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Comment by focom | Hacker News Reader

"Europe 2.0" aka "the usa" has a better free speech implementation than "Europe 1.0". So yes different as in bad.

USA is no Europe nor Rome. "free speech" is vague term.

I'm not sure the US approach to free speech works that well in practice. Political polarization has become worse in the US than in most other developed countries, and that looks like a consequence of free speech. When you value free speech far above social harmony, you give a lot of power to extremists of all kinds.

It is better to go through a phase like this than live in a country where you're not allowed to speak freely.

This is the cost of being free, not everyone likes it, but it way better than the alternative.

On what basis are the US limits to speech better than the European ones? The US is arguably a more violent society now - is that the better part? The GDP per capita being higher? The trade-off between the two?

On the fact that you're investigated because you hold certain beliefs or say something that the party currently holding power doesn't like.

I don't think it is a more violent society. Maybe in the discourse, but not in actual crime. And yes, people are more polarized, but I think it is tied more to the economic context than anything else.

Have you looked at homicide figures, for example? Europe around 3 per 100k (EU below 2), US above 6.

The party thing was in the Eastern bloc, not sure where that is now the case.

I would say having access to guns in the US makes killing someone much easier than in the EU where most countries banned guns, making murders much harder to commit with a knife or a blunt object.

But this aside, did the murder rates increase in the last 10-20 years, decreased or is it the same?

Switzerland has a lot of guns but a homicide rate below 1 per 100k, it is not necessarily the guns as such.

US rate is a little bit up from early 2010s, but a lot lower than in the 1980s, in the EU the rate was low in the early 2020s compared to the previous ten years.

How do you reconcile this against the fact that extreme anti-establishment parties are surging throughout Europe, including in places like Germany that have some of the most extreme restrictions on speech? For instance Germany is now even considering trying to ban the AfD [1] (political party) who are now polling at > 20%, which is quite high in a functional multi-party system - higher than Olaf Scholz’s Social Democrats party. Incidentally 47% of the country supports banning them, 47% oppose it. There have also been numerous instances of violence against party members, and more. And there are similar divides in many other European countries.

The one thing I'm certain of is that we're all living through a major inflection point in history, for better or for worse.

[1] - https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2023/08/13/afd-party-ban-ge...

European countries have a history of assimilating anti-establishment parties into the establishment. They did it with revolutionary communists, they did it with the green movement, and now they are doing it with the conservative nationalist / right-wing populist / whatever parties. The Finnish equivalent of the AfD is in a coalition government led by the traditional center-right party. In Sweden, the corresponding party supports the right-wing coalition. And in Italy, Brothers of Italy is the leading party in a coalition that turned out to be unexpectedly moderate.

I think here you're talking more about what eventually will happen, while your earlier comment (and the one I was responding to), is more about what is happening. The fact that the polarization may end up playing out better than in the US (though the situation in Germany as of yet gives no indications of that) is a different issue than the fact that there is an undeniably sharp rise in polarization, even in places with stringent speech controls.

In my experience, polarization has been in decline in Europe for a few years. It started rising in the aftermath of the financial crisis and the refugee crisis, but the farce around Brexit and the Russian invasion of Ukraine tempered it. People are again willing to work within the system rather than trying to replace it with something radically different.

Germany is a bit of a special case due to their history. They still can't cope with anything that looks even remotely similar to fascism.

But it's not really "Germany" calling the AfD fascist, in fact ever more Germans are voting for them. Rather the people who don't like them are calling them fascist. You're effectively describing an effect of extreme polarization, where 'the other side' is demonized in ways with, at best, tenuous connections to reality.

I think your post hits on the primary cause of polarization: incompatible ideologies. One group in [some country] want ever more immigrants, regardless of the cost or quality. The other side wants to limit immigration to skilled and educated migrants who are expected to learn the local language and integrate into society. These two sides' views are different enough that it's pretty tough to get a meet in the middle, and the issue is relatively urgent, so you get polarization.

Of course this leads to nasty online conversations where you might have one group talking about the crime rates of new migrants, while the other side calls them racist or fascists for doing such. And I would agree that this probably contributes to polarization, but it's also an effect of an already existing polarization, rather than anything even close to a core cause. Europe's had no difficulty polarizing plenty throughout history, long before the internet. It's just for the past ~80 years we've all been living in a little bubble of relative peace, tranquility, and growth. And I think that bubble has popped.

The European free speech legal infrastructure dates from the ECHR in 1950, and was somewhat imposed by the Allies after the war. As well as a lot of people who wanted to avoid having populist incitement to genocide again.

The limits on free speech in European countries are also much older in parts. The history in Europe on that topic is just very different from the US, I'd say.

Indeed. People forget that e.g. Portugal, Greece, and Spain were dictatorships until the 70s, and that a lot of eastern EU was under Communism until 1990s.

"The EU" is not equivalent to "France and Germany", despite what they think.

The speech culture of France and Germany is very different to the US as well, it's not just the dictatorships of the recent past.

Nazism as an ideology is illegal to promote in Germany. Use of Nazi symbols outside of an artistic or educational context is illegal in Germany and France (most European countries really). Several neo-nazi, neo-fascist, and communist parties have been banned since the founding of the modern German state. Far-right parties in Germany are always walking a fine line - if their membership flirts too much with nazism or fascism they are very much liable to be banned.

Several European countries with strong democratic traditions in the modern era remain very wary of extreme ideologies. Their proponents murdered millions and burned the continent to the ground less than a century ago. Most people are comfortable with the state killing these movements in their infancy.

What's your evidence for the assessment?

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