Britain Is Losing Its Free Speech, and America Could Be Next | Hacker News Reader

Britain Is Losing Its Free Speech, and America Could Be Next

currentaffairs.org

30 pointsSynaesthesia13 comments

We have a constitution that grants among other things, freedom of speech. They, well, don't.

The Constitution saying we have free speech doesn't really mean anything. It's up to the courts to decide what that means and there's no guarantee that the US will necessarily end up having stronger free speech protections than any other country in practice.

We have a constitution that plainly grants birthright citizenship as well. Let's see how that goes. My guess is that SCOTUS will never rule on it. They've already prohibited lower courts from making nationwide injunctions protecting it, and will decline to take any cases challenging Trump's EO, basically leaving Trump to do as he pleases. So the constitution is no protection if enforcement is lacking.

Well both Britain and the US are on a slippery slope right now, towards thought control and fascism.

That doesn't scare me because it being a fallacy means it's not real.

I'm honestly unsure if you're genuinely that dumb or you're just doing a really, really good job satirizing the people who got us here.

Every step of the way so far useful idiots have come out of the woodwork to defend each and every incremental encroachment on our rights using some sort of tortured logic that uses some mumbo jumbo about common good to justify it while downplaying the danger and over-selling the benefit.

The weapons grade irony here is that, either by satire and sarcasm or by genuinely being that stupid you have gone too far, to the point of absurdity, you have (perhaps intentionally, perhaps unwittingly) distilled these stupid people's stupid belief down to basically one sentence "the slippery slope isn't real and everything is fine because we have a piece of paper" and when you lay it out like that it's obvious that that is a belief nobody who's got a couple brain cells to rub together would hold.

A piece of paper means nothing if people don't want it to and we will slide down the slippery slope unless there's a force stopping us.

Fallacies are errors in thinking. I'm unsure why someone would want to justify their argument on the grounds of an error in thinking.

If we're cool with invoking fallacies, then I'm going to employ a non sequitur fallacy: Since I posted here, I'm right.

I'd like to hear why one use of a fallacy is fine and another case isn't. Special pleading?

A slippery slope is fallacious when the argument is made with little evidence or reasoning to connect the current state/action to the supposed bottom of the slope. Whether or not you agree with the reasoning is one thing, but there’s been a great deal of argument and discourse talking about the ways we are approaching worse and worse things, and the ways we have purportedly already progressed down the metaphorical slope. Acknowledging fallacy is one thing, but categorically dismissing all arguments that discuss the (observed and/or potential) repercussions that can arise from current trends and actions on account “slippery slope is a fallacy”, with absolutely zero critical thinking applied to argue against the reasoning and/or alleged evidence of the slope is, well, unreasonable, I feel.

You can argue that the original comment just said “it’s a slippery slope!”, and so that specific conversation is not very valuable, but there’s a lot of surrounding discourse that makes “haha you’re wrong/your topic is invalid because you only said slippery slope!” Is obtuse at best.

And if I didn’t clarify enough, it’s not as if “slippery slopes” don’t and/or physically can’t exist. It’s just that frequently people claim there is one with no argument to support it, just that “it is” a slippery slope, and that it is scary/true just because of the way that it is. That’s fallacy.

The worst part is that I don't disagree that the US and UK are moving toward fascism - or at least some form of ethno-state where a WASPish core retains rights and everyone else has to fend for themselves.

What I am asking for, and pointing out, is that we can do better. It came from a moment of pedantry and honestly a pet peeve. Take what I said with a grain of salt.

yeah, it might be better to talk about a frog in a steadily warming pot rather than losing traction on a slope, but now I'm worried about your username lol

>The Brits ... now have to enter an ID to use websites like Twitter, Bluesky, Discord, YouTube, Spotify, and potentially even Wikipedia.

I'm a Brit and have had to enter nothing to access any of those and don't intend entering an ID. There isn't a legal requirement to even have an ID in the UK.

You've heard about the legislation for this, right? The sites you use probably presume you're over 18.

But that's not the most disturbing thing, what's disturbing is the way "terrorism" or "proscribed organisations" are defined, and you're not allowed to voice support for them.

Those that give up liberty for safety deserve neither.

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