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Comment by RationalDino | Hacker News Reader

Yes, individuals are allowed to have a public forum for that. We have freedom of speech after all.

However such a forum is going to be of particular interest for would-be money launderers. And therefore you should expect it to be monitored by people connected to the financial system. With the result being that active participation in such a forum may itself become grounds for a SAR to be slapped on you.

A SAR that, of course, you will never be informed of. Because, as patio11 documents, that is the law.

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IMO AML should be abolished because it is ineffective, inefficient and nothing would effectively change if removed. It recovers 100x less than its compliance cost. It’s the TSA of banking, it’s motion without progress.

https://content.11fs.com/article/aml-is-the-worlds-most-inef...

The question isn't how much crime it catches. It is how much crime it prevents in the first place.

(No, I'm not suggesting that I have an answer to that question. Just that you're measuring by the wrong measuring stick.)

How much crime it catches is directly related to how much crime it could prevent. If the measure is totally ineffective and criminals hardly ever get caught then there is no deterrent.

It really isn't so simple. My views on this are informed by https://www.bitsaboutmoney.com/archive/money-laundering-and-..., so you might want to read that.

First, there are widely known techniques to beat AML. Criminals use them. Using them imposes costs. So you can reduce the profitability of crime, and therefore its frequency, without catching much crime directly.

Secondly, one of the goals of AML regulations is to make it easy to construct a money laundering case against a criminal caught another way. This is kind of like putting Al Capone in jail for tax evasion. Tax evasion isn't why you want him in jail, it is just the thing you can convict him of. Prosecutors see value in these easy convictions.

Are they worthwhile? That's above my paygrade. Certainly patio11 makes a case that they might not be. But both of the things that I just mentioned show that the rules are valued for reasons other than routinely catching a lot of crime.

> First, there are widely known techniques to beat AML. Criminals use them. Using them imposes costs. So you can reduce the profitability of crime, and therefore its frequency, without catching much crime directly.

This is only reasonable if the same measures don't also impose costs on innocent people, which is not the case.

And the value of doing this operates inversely with value: The crime you deter this way is the lowest value crime which is the easiest to deter through some other means, but the innocent people you most harm are the ones already at the margin who you don't want to deter/bankrupt, but you do.

Which damages the most competitive markets with businesses that were operating with the thinnest margins and forces them to consolidate into something that can absorb the compliance cost. The cost of inducing that kind of market consolidation is enormous -- as we've seen time and again.

> Secondly, one of the goals of AML regulations is to make it easy to construct a money laundering case against a criminal caught another way. This is kind of like putting Al Capone in jail for tax evasion. Tax evasion isn't why you want him in jail, it is just the thing you can convict him of. Prosecutors see value in these easy convictions.

Undoubtedly the lobby in favor of AML laws is lazy prosecutors who can't be bothered to prove their case honestly and would rather have a vague law that causes common behavior to be a chargeable violation. But that purposeful subversion of the rule of law isn't a legitimate reason even if it wasn't imposing major costs on innocent people.

Thing is, if you’re laundering money, you’re probably doing something incredibly profitable (importing kilos of something that cost you $2k and then selling for $20k, or just straight up stolen funds with no cost basis).

These groups have no issue with the few percent cost of added transaction friction.

But it really costs people running low-margin businesses or unsophisticated honest people just trying to move overseas, remit funds to family or buy a home overseas.

And the knock-on effects of the bypasses becoming things like “buy a front-business and care less about the legitimate competitors that can’t compete with someone unworried about profit” or “buy a house and let it sit empty”.

> How much crime it catches is directly related to how much crime it could prevent.

If you could actually prove that, I think you'd become quite famous in sociological/economic science.

So no, I think you're making an unwarranted assumption: "How much you can catch" is not necessarily proportional to "How many would have tried except for the fear of being caught."

In particular, actual/would-be violators have a distribution of different motivations and tolerances for risk.

Proportionality doesn't have to be linear, and in this case it's unlikely to be, but in the way that makes the AML rules even more worthless.

You might deter the large majority of crime if the chance of getting caught is one in three, because the cost of getting caught is also high. But if the chance of getting caught is only 0.2%, from a psychological perspective people are much more likely to see that and discount the possibility of it happening at all, and mathematically it would be unreasonable to impose a penalty high enough to compensate for such an abysmal rate of effectiveness. So ineffective rules aren't just useless, they're disproportionately useless.

This is clearly not true. Why else do organizations involved in large scale ML move to locations with more lax AML regimes? E.g. crypto in eastern Europe. If the risk of being caught was no deterrent, ML activity would be dependent on 'amount of launderable funds' and independent of AML regime - can you offer an argument showing this is true?

> E.g. crypto in eastern Europe.

Ah the crypto boogeyman! That argument is ridiculous. The CIA factbook estimates that the proportion of the GDP linked to crime worldwide is 3% to 5%: that's 3 to 5 TRILLION USD directly linked to criminal activities.

Cryptocurrencies do not even register here. It's not even a drop in the bucket.

Moreover public ledgers are what law enforcement and IRS' employeees' wet dreams are made of.

One of the reasons it's so ineffective is that you can move to jurisdictions with different laws (or corrupt governments), so the law only negatively impacts innocent people in your own country, meanwhile criminals have stable alternatives.

The absolute magnitude of crime it catches is completely irrelevant. The earlier poster is incorrect saying is useless because

> It recovers 100x less than its compliance cost.

The proportion of crime that it catches is of interest to criminals and is what will have the deterrence effect, but whether it catches 10% or 90% is difficult to know as a layperson.

It's not actually that difficult to know, you can look it up. It isn't 90% effective, or 10%, but rather 0.2% effective.

The other major problem here is that what you're deterring isn't the underlying crime that generates the money but rather the activity that triggers AML scrutiny. So you have little hope of deterring the underlying crime, all you do is cause people to organize their finances in a different way. Which is hardly worth imposing significant costs on millions of innocent people.

It's "0.2% effective" by measuring in an arbitrary and frankly unrelated way. That figure comes from "what number do we get if we take the amount of illegal funds caught, and divide by the amount of money spent by other companies complying with the regulations?"

I'm sure you'll agree that this doesn't actually relate in any way to the specific number discussed above, aside from sharing the adjective "effective" used as a descriptor.

The cost of compliance to legitimate parties does not have any obvious mechanism to directly affect the deterrence effect.

That's overly simplistic. AML laws serve more purposes than simply catching money laundering, they discourage the underlying crime in the first place. Discouraging that can't be counted, yet you are saying is "AML doesn't catch anything!" But you can't prove the negative.

AML also serves to buttress public support in the financial system because the public interest is being served, and at least recently, without AML the housing crisis would be significantly worse.

"Let the criminals put their cash wherever they want, because it's too expensive to stop them" Isn't exactly the rallying cry you think it is

Anti-Money Laundering laws are a complete anti-democratic tyranny. With AML you are assumed guilty anytime you possess money, or participate in any financial transactions, or have any assets. If called upon to do so you will have to prove your innocence beyond a reasonable doubt, and if you fail to do so, your assets or money can be permanently seized. All of this occurs without any form of due process.

The government actually wouldn’t be able to make these regulations for itself, and the only way it manages to make AML laws work is with a complete governance anti-pattern. Where they simply tell the banks that if they unknowingly allow any “money laundering”, then they will be punished, rather than actually creating some regulations for them to follow. So the institutions just create these kafkaesque nightmares themselves, because they don’t really care about who gets screwed over by them.

The worse part is that money laundering is trivially easy for anybody who wants to do it, it just costs money to do the compliance properly. The only people who get thwarted by these laws are immigrants who do a lot of remittance, and law-abiding wealthy people who naively think they’re entitled to possess their own money. Two groups that society generally doesn’t care at all about protecting.

I personally make a lot of money off the AML compliance industry, so I’m not really complaining for my own sake. But these laws are the intended outcome of “anti-terrorism” and “anti-tax-evasion” policies.

> Anti-Money Laundering laws are a complete anti-democratic tyranny.

But they were produced through the democratic process: we have told our elected representatives that we want them to Do Something about things like organized crime and international terrorism, and these laws are part of the Something That Was Done. The laws will not change unless and until we the people change the incentives we give our elected representatives.

Wether or not laws and policies have, in practice, anything to do with what people want, is still up for debate [1] [2].

It could also be argued that such laws and policies have mainly been enacted by states in order to eliminate threats to their authority, legitimacy, or continued existence, through financial control.

Which may or may not be the case. Just pointing out that states, even liberal democracies, may not always be all about expressing the will of their constituents.

[1]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

[2]: https://www.vox.com/2016/5/9/11502464/gilens-page-oligarchy-...

> Wether or not laws and policies have, in practice, anything to do with what people want, is still up for debate

If we the people wanted something different, we would be voting differently. The fact that we continue to vote for the same incumbents means they are doing what we want.

Yes and no.

See gerrymandering. See abstention rates and voter apathy.

Politics, like any system, can be gamed. Considering the incentives and interests at play, it is no surprise that it is. Taking into account how long these systems or similar have been in place, it shouldn’t be surprising that efficient tactics and strategies have been devised and refined over time.

Also considering how uneducated most of us are when it comes to politics, it is no surprise that most of us fall continuously fall for age old tactics and strategies.

Regarding "we the people", I personally do not come from nor live in the US. In the country I come from, people chose to do exactly what you suggest and vote for someone new. They eschewed both traditional parties, did not fall into the extremes' traps, and elected… the underdog!

Or so they thought. It seems they hate him now. He did get reelected, but by less than 40% of the people who could vote if they cared to or believed it would change anything.

Nothing new under the sun, really. I’m pretty sure we’d find the same patterns at play in Athen’s Boule and Ancient Rome.

But hey, "with every mistake we must surely be learning".

In case it wasn’t clear, I have personally entirely given up on both my fellow citizens and my home country’s (a liberal democracy as well) politics.

Individual House Representatives usually have high approval ratings from people who voted them in while Congress as a whole has a terrible approval rating. It's not quite as simple as seeing historical election results and saying everybody is necessarily happy with their representation.

> Individual House Representatives usually have high approval ratings from people who voted them in while Congress as a whole has a terrible approval rating.

Yes, that's true. (And the Senate is no different.) What does it mean?

I think it means that people do not realize the actual problem. They don't see the two facts you cite as at odds with each other or connected to each other at all. But they are. The reason why Congress can have such a low approval rating while incumbency reelection rates remain high are that people think it's all those other members of Congress who are the problem--if only everyone would listen to their members of Congress, all that stuff would get fixed. They don't realize that, if you send someone to Congress to fix something, and it doesn't get fixed, you need to send someone else. You can't keep allowing the incumbents to hide behind "it's not me, it's all those others" forever.

>> Individual House Representatives usually have high approval ratings from people who voted them in while Congress as a whole has a terrible approval rating.

> Yes, that's true. (And the Senate is no different.) What does it mean?

Red voters tend to live in red seats & states, blue voters tend to live in blue seats and states.

> Red voters tend to live in red seats & states, blue voters tend to live in blue seats and states.

This is a tautology. It doesn't change anything I said.

Sure.

I still think it's the most intuitive way to describe the first-order explanation for why people are happy with their specific representatives, but not Congress as a whole.

Just a reminder- modern democracies are a set of democratic institutions such as civil service, independent courts, free media, and some elected representatives. Rule by the people has not meant democracy for over a hundred years.

There's no evidence that representatives do what constituents want them to do. In fact, there's evidence they do what billionaires want them to do.

> There's no evidence that representatives do what constituents want them to do.

Sure there is. "Want them to do" means the constituents decide their votes based on Something Being Done. The fact that we the people continue to vote in our incumbent representatives at rates over 90 percent is a direct measure of the extent to which those representatives are doing what we want them to do.

No, that doesn't measure that they are doing what we want them to do. That measures how effectively they can convince us that the other candidate would be worse, so you should vote for the lesser evil.

On most topics, there is NO candidate who is for doing things outside of the current Overton window. If, for example, you don't like our AML laws, you probably don't have a viable candidate on the ballot who wants to change our AML laws. Therefore your vote can't show your support for changing AML laws.

> On most topics, there is NO candidate who is for doing things outside of the current Overton window.

Sure there is.

They aren't likely to be a major party candidate, but then, that's pretty much true by the definition of the Overton window -- if it is supported enough to be a tolerable position for a major party candidate that isn't an extreme outlier within the party, then it is not outside the range of acceptability than the Overton Window refers to.

(Of course, the major point of the Overton Window is that, in a system with elected lawmakers, laws largely aren't set by lawmakers preferences, but by forces, largely external to lawmakers -- including both concentrated interest groups and grassroots activists -- that shift the Overton Window and set the bounds for what it is practical for lawmakers to support.)

> that doesn't measure that they are doing what we want them to do. That measures how effectively they can convince us that the other candidate would be worse

If we are convinced, then they are doing what we want them to do--because they convinced us that there is no point in wanting anything else.

> On most topics, there is NO candidate who is for doing things outside of the current Overton window.

Yes, but what is the Overton window? It's the range of policies that most people will accept. So by definition only policies within the Overton window can possibly be what the people (or at least a majority of us) want.

It's actually the range of policies that we won't literally riot about if they push on us.

No, that we won't vote them out of office (or refuse to vote them into office) about. Which is functionally equivalent to "accept".

Voting them out of office doesn't matter. Their opponent supports the same policies.

> The fact that we the people continue to vote in our incumbent representatives at rates over 90 percent is a direct measure of the extent to which those representatives are doing what we want them to do.

This is an artifact of the districting system. A given district wants the local military base to stay open, or tax credits for the local industry. Their representative gets them that, so they get reelected. To get them that they screw over the general public in a thousand ways -- mostly by trading other representatives for the things that aren't in the public interest but their districts want -- but none of them are big enough for the people in the district to change their vote, and most of them couldn't have been prevented by a single representative anyway. So the bums fail to get voted out.

> This is an artifact of the districting system.

Which in no way contradicts what I said. The fact that what the people want (or at least a voting majority of us) actually screws over the general public does not mean the people don't want it. It just means that what the people want is not actually good for all of us in the long run. Welcome to reality.

You implied that the majority of voters want Something To Be Done and so keep reelecting the people who do this. In fact what happens is that the majority of voters don't even know that this issue exists, but some interest group wants it and captures a representative whose district isn't going to notice or care what their representative is doing on this and then trades votes on other issues their district also doesn't care about to get what they want from other representatives.

There are existing laws that couldn't command majority support in any district much less a majority of them but remain on the books because the representatives who support them continue to be reeelected for independent reasons.

The fact that people given a choice between "abortion is illegal" or "poors don't starve to death" choose "abortion is illegal" doesn't mean they want poors to starve to death (although they do want that); it just means they want abortion to be illegal more.

Okay, it was a bad example because those kinds of hardliners do want all the bad things to happen. People given a choice between "close the military base and lose your jobs" and "keep your jobs, but we drop more bombs on brown people" don't necessarily want to drop more bombs on brown people, but they do want to keep their jobs.

> given a choice between "abortion is illegal" or "poors don't starve to death"

What are you talking about? No voter is faced with that choice.

> those kinds of hardliners do want all the bad things to happen

Who are these "hardliners" you speak of?

> People given a choice between "close the military base and lose your jobs" and "keep your jobs, but we drop more bombs on brown people"

No voter is faced with that choice either. Closing the military base in a particular district doesn't mean the military downsizes. It just means the base gets built in some other district whose representatives were better at getting pork for their constituents.

None of these things have anything to do with the basic problem I described.

Mostly we vote based on our personal biggest issue, no matter what they do on the other issues. A lot of Republicans vote Republican because they claim to hate abortion, and they literally don't care about the rest.

Nonsense. It’s entirely possible for tyrannical laws to become self-sustaining by applying them for political purposes.

>and law-abiding wealthy people who naively think they’re entitled to possess their own money.

They should be fine as long as they show receipts.

I really hope this is a joke lol. The amount of paperwork required today is far in excess of anything required pre-GFC. Basically any wealth acquired prior to then is up for confiscation, and this happens all the time. But again, nobody cares, because injustices delivered upon the rich are fine. Imagine you inherited a property from your parents, how do you imagine you’d be able to prove the provenance of that asset? Or the cash used to buy it/pay the mortgage on it? You can’t.

>Imagine you inherited a property from your parents, how do you imagine you’d be able to prove the provenance of that asset? Or the cash used to buy it/pay the mortgage on it? You can’t.

Do you have an example of what you mean by this? Like they will say "well you don't have your old paper pay stubs from the 1990s when you were paying the mortgage on your house so we will confiscate your house, go die alone in the gutter"? Because I find that hard to believe. Most people with wealth have an obvious reason for that wealth which is documented in the formal bureaucratic system.

> well you don't have your old paper pay stubs from the 1990s when you were paying the mortgage on your house so we will confiscate your house

Yes this is basically how it works. The only contrived thing about my example is that we’re talking about one house a person inherited, rather than millions of dollars in assets.

Here’s a well documented example of this happening in real life

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2022-09-30/judge-ba...

> A federal judge ruled Friday that the FBI’s seizure of tens of millions of dollars in cash and valuables from 700 safe-deposit boxes in Beverly Hills did not violate anyone’s constitutional rights.

> The decision by U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner endorsed law-enforcement tactics that tested the limits of how aggressive federal agents can be in seizing money and property in the absence of any evidence that the owner committed a crime.

> The ruling did not address some of the most controversial aspects of the raid, such as the FBI’s attempt to confiscate assets from box holders on the presumption they were criminals, even in cases where agents had no evidence to validate their suspicions.

Of course, nobody cares, because those people are rich, so they probably didn’t deserve that money anyway…

To be fair:

“The government seized the nests of safety deposit boxes because there was overwhelming evidence that [the deposit box storage location] was a criminal business that conspired with its criminal clients to distribute drugs, launder money, and structure transactions to avoid currency reporting requirements, among other offenses,” they said in papers filed in Los Angeles federal court.

https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2021-04-02/fbi-beve...

You can request your items back here: https://forms.fbi.gov/u-s-private-vaults-claim-form

Personally I don’t think there is any “to be fair” interpretation of the government making a presumption of guilt and placing the burden onto members of the public to prove their own innocence.

I assure you, rich people care very deeply about having their money taken away, and are, as a class, incredibly litigious, and are often politically connected.

I am not very impressed by implications that of the truly downtrodden and powerless people in the United States, the 'rich' are anywhere near the front of that line.

If you inherited it (at least in the US) there will be probate records. And property transfer records. There's LOTS of documentation for that sort of thing.

Records that you inherited it are not enough. Where are the records that your parents acquired it properly? Where are the records that prove the money they used to acquire the house were acquired properly? This is the trouble with a presumption of guilt, proving these things are basically impossible.

No. Probate records that you inherited it are enough to get property transferred to your name and the title recorded as such. If you want to be covered just in case your parents somehow stole the land and falsified their ownership, title insurance is a thing.

None of this is impossible. None of this is unknowable. This all happens everyday.

The problem (this time) isn't that they try to deny your title to the property, it's that you sell the property and they freeze your account with the money in it and now the burden is on you to prove that your parents acquired it lawfully, which you have no way to do because it happened many years ago and your parents have passed away.

No. If you have title, it's presumed that the land has been lawfully transferred. If someone/.gov wants to claim otherwise, they need to prove that. The entire mortgage market is predicated on that. Can someone cite an instance where someone who "inherited property had to prove their parents acquired it legally because their funds were frozen after a sale" because I'd be very interested in seeing that. I'd be a LOT more willing to believe that a sale fell through because the BUYERS couldn't verify the parent's title, but that's not what's described here.

Do buyers here not do a title exam?

It's not the title which is the issue. You transferred the title and received the money and then the bank took the money. The buyer still has the title and doesn't care about you anymore, and you have no claim to get it back because they actually paid you. But then the bank stole the money they paid you because you couldn't prove how you got the title to begin with.

I think it's pretty clear by now that "anti money laundering" is just the financial arm of warrantless global mass surveillance. Money laundering may be a crime but it does not justify this. "Monitoring" people and punishing them because they "might" be some money launderer or terrorist is completely backwards and should be a violation of basic rights.

> We have freedom of speech after all.

You don't, though.

Freedom of speech almost never meant and never will mean to be able to speak whatever you want to whoever you want wherever you want whenever you want. No matter what propaganda tells. There are limits and will be limits, and except anarchists nobody can say that this is what they really want in good faith. We know as a fact that uncontrolled free speech is harmful.

Currently, almost everybody who say this, want something else, and this is just a tool to achieve that other thing. A proven harmful tool.

There is free speech in the USA.

> Freedom of speech almost never meant and never will mean to be able to speak whatever you want to whoever you want wherever you want whenever you want

That is quite literally what it means. Everything else is a retcon. (It still doesn't mean freedom of social consequences though)

You said it yourself: uncontrolled free speech is harmful. That means there should be mostly free speech, but not completely free speech.

> That is quite literally what it means

Legally in the US, it has never meant this. No freedom, even Constitutionally enumerated ones, is absolute. It logically cannot be different than this because every freedom we have can be used in a way that infringes on another person's freedom. The path to maximal liberty for everyone always requires some limits on individual liberty.

Sticks and stones can break my bones, but speech rarely infringes on my constitutional rights.

It didn’t mean that in Ancient Greece because whoever used that idea didn’t thought that slaves were humans, it didn’t mean that in Middle Ages because everybody who used that used it for specific locations or forms, and it definitely doesn’t mean that since Mill, because nobody use that without including some level of harm principle under an asterisk.

The exceptions are as old as the idea itself. The retcon is thinking otherwise.

> Freedom of speech almost never meant and never will mean to be able to speak whatever you want to whoever you want wherever you want whenever you want That is quite literally what it means.

>> That is quite literally what it means.

From a platonic ideal, true. But in reality platonic ideals do not exist. Does pure capitalism exist anywhere? No, because without some regulatory scheme it would devolve quickly into plutocracy, planned economy or a regulated capitalist economy.

So you acknowledge that freedom of speech is a platonic ideal, which the USA doesn't have.

So are you saying that nobody wants free speech (except anarchists as I mentioned)?

I don't care how many people want free speech. That is completely irrelevant. You are the one defending that the USA has it.

It matters because if the USA doesn’t have it because of your reasoning, then all of those people lied.

And currently, your words against basically the whole relevant literature, laws, and basically almost all of humanity. Especially those which describe how people use expressions meaning a scale as an absolutist term, which happens continuously, like in your case too.

Yes, I think all those people lied. Didn't I say that? American "free speech absolutists" keep finding poor rationalizations to exclude the kinds of speech they happen to dislike from the definition of "free speech". By contrast, in Europe, those people simply don't call themselves absolutists, state openly that free speech has some exceptions, and don't have to rationalize anything.

The US does. Most countries don't.

The US doesn't have free speech. It just deluded itself into thinking its version of unfree speech is either somehow not speech, or just doesn't count for some dumb reason or another. There are many things you can't say in the USA.

The EU is just more upfront about its limitations. The EU says: Free speech is good, but some of it is dangerous so you can't have all of it, sorry. The US simply says: We have free speech. Then it arrests you for speaking anyway.

Find something you can't say in the US, and ask a (sufficiently educated) American about it. They'll tell you it's not really free speech or it doesn't count or some nonsense like that, and that America has free speech. A (sufficiently educated) European will tell you it's one of the exceptions.

> The US doesn't have free speech.

Oh, it absolutely does. It's really the only country that I would say absolutely does.

No other country has free speech enshrined in it's constitution to the same extent, nor such a strong history of caselaw defending it. The US has a lot of problems, but as a people they are almost as zealous in defending free speech as they are in defending the 2nd amendment. In most other countries other concerns might take priority, but often and only in the US free speech will be the first consideration.

> Find something you can't say in the US

Anything can be said.

> Anything can be said.

Please, go to your local town square and hand out flyers about your plot to assassinate the President. Report back with your results.

Oh, and I can predict your reply. You will tell me some excuse for why that isn't really speech, or it is speech but it shouldn't be free even in countries that have 100% free speech (which is a completely absurd argument, by the way - I must recommend you try the "that isn't speech" approach as at least that one isn't not an immediate formal contradiction).

People like that often don't get arrested. At most the Secret Service will take note and make them stay home if there's a VIP anywhere nearby.

There's lots of crazy people and we don't keep them in prisons anymore.

It's not very free if you can get confined to your house for saying it.

> Please, go to your local town square and hand out flyers about your plot to assassinate the President. Report back with your results.

Ah, lol. I thought you might try something like this.

Yes, there are some exceptions, e.g. yelling fire in a crowded theater, but they generally don't count. They are not restrictions on anything you actually want to say or communicate, they are restrictions on causing a riot or disturbance.

The difference is in the US you can actually say anything you want to say to communicate any opinion or information you want. That isn't true in most other first world countries.

Just look at people getting arrested for protesting Charles' coronation in the UK, people all over Australia, NZ, Europe etc being arrested in pro Palestine (NOT pro Hamas) protests, people being arrested or facing legal issues for giving an opinion on something COVID related in countries other than the US..etc etc etc.

> Oh, and I can predict your reply.

Well, you made a disingenuous argument and were well aware that you did, so that isn't entirely surprising. However, I clarified the claim making that tired old fallacious response entirely irrelevant.

Ideological purity may wish otherwise, but there’s a meta-layer here: there are inevitable limits to “free speech” when said speech genuinely threatens the institution that otherwise allows free speech.

You are not free to earnestly threaten president or call others to do so. You are not free to share speech that’s been deemed classified. You are not free to conspire with foreign enemies. etc.

While the US does protect many forms of forms of political speech that are deemed impotent or that advocate radical position within the rubric of its institutions, it does have roughly much the same ultimate limitations as every other modern liberal democracy (and many modern non-democracies).

It’s not actually very much of an outlier at all.

> You are not free to earnestly threaten president or call others to do so.

Because that's not speech, as in an opinion. It's a call to action. But you can speak all day long about how the president is useless and should be replaced. People in the UK couldn't even protest the coronation of Charles without facing arrest.

> it does have roughly much the same ultimate limitations as every other modern liberal democracy (and many modern non-democracies).

Simply not true. People get arrested for speech in other first world countries that would not happen in the US.

> It’s not actually very much of an outlier at all.

It very much is.

Calls to action are speech. When I open my mouth and words come out of it, that is speech. When I punch you in the face, that is not speech. When I tell someone else to punch you in the face, that is speech. When he punches you, that is not speech. I don't know how much simpler I can make it.

If I'm not free to tell someone to punch you in the face, then I don't have absolute free speech.

> Calls to action are speech.

Yes, technically, but come on now. You're being disingenuous.

Let's forgo the semantic bullshit which is a pretty shoddy attempt at making a point to begin with.

Instead of saying 'freedom of speech', since you want to be so technical, we can say 'freedom to express any opinion'. The USA has significantly more freedom for people to 'express any opinion' than other first world countries.

> I don't know how much simpler I can make it.

You're not making anything 'simple', you're making a disingenuous point to try and support an even more, forgive me, asinine point that isn't really correct except in a meaningless semantic way. You're ignoring the spirit of what is being discussed and acting like you've refuted a claim; you haven't even come close.

Why don't you actually try and address the claim made instead of playing silly semantic games in lieu of an argument?

But people aren't talking about "freedom to express any opinion". They're talking about "free speech".

Yes, and as generally used and meant, it means "freedom to express any opinion".

No one reasonable disagrees that you shouldn't be able to yell fire in a crowded theater. There have never been people advocating for that when they argue for free speech.

Pointing out there is a restriction on causing riots or disturbances to argue that there is not truly free speech is rather meaningless. It's a 'victory' only in the most technical sense, and not one worth recognizing considering how irrelevant it is to the actual discussion, which relates to "freedom to express any opinion".

Just to be clear, the claim is that the US has significantly more freedom to "express any opinion" than any other first world country does. In this context, "freedom to express any opinion" is generally referred to as "freedom of speech".

All democracies do, one way or the other.

Plenty of democracies with weak or highly overridable constitutions.

Most of Canada’s is like that. Basically governments can suspend all of your “fundamental freedoms” for 5 year periods, renewed as often as they like.

Every country is like that, including the USA.

No it's not, as evidence by the numerous laws struck down by the Supreme Court.

The laws don't mean anything if you get arrested anyway.

Sure they do because you’re released.

You can't seriously be that naive. Or maybe you're just trolling. Where's the block feature?

I'm naive to think that people arrested when the Supreme Court strikes down a law get released?

Not to anywhere near the same extent. Meaning, not when it matters.

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