Hacker News Reader

Comment by subsistence234 | Hacker News Reader

[flagged]

Western Europe is not an authoritarian dystopia by any measure. Economic growth or lack of thereof is absolutely irrelevant here

> Western Europe is not an authoritarian dystopia by any measure

People are locked up in the Germany and the UK because they criticize the government, its politicians or their policies. I live in Germany.

Who is locked up for criticizing the government in Germany? You can be fined for insulting a government official, and I think it's a bad law and should be retracted, but a) insulting is not the same as criticizing and b) I've never heard of a single person locked up because of it - you'd basically need to deliberately refuse paying the fine for that

188 Criminal Code Insult, defamation and slander directed against persons in political life[1]:

(1) If an insult (§ 185) is committed against a person involved in the political life of the people, either publicly, at a meeting or by disseminating content (§ 11 (3)), for reasons related to the position of the offended person in public life, and if the act is likely to significantly impede their public activities, the penalty shall be imprisonment for up to three years or a fine. The political life of the people extends to the local level.

(2) Under the same conditions, defamation (§ 186) shall be punished with imprisonment from three months to five years, and slander (§ 187) with imprisonment from six months to five years.

This law is commonly criticized by free speech activists in Germany, as well as liberal parties like Die Linke and FDP. It was updated to be even harsher by our last government. David Bendels received a sentence of 7 months for posting an edited insulting picture of Nancy Faeser, Germany's last minister for interior affairs. The case sparked an international outcry and got a lot of press coverage [2]. Note that ironically the doctored image showed Faeser holding a sign with the message "I hate freedom of speech".

[1]: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/stgb/__188.html [2]: https://www.thetimes.com/world/europe/article/germany-insult...

Yanis Varoufakis, I think? Except he was banned from Germany, not locked up. If he tries to enter, then he might be locked up. They used the intermediate step of calling him a terrorist.

I live in the UK. This has not happened here

"UK police made over 12,000 arrests under laws criminalizing communications causing 'annoyance or anxiety,' with arrests rising 58% since 2019" [1]. Only 10% lead to a conviction. What then, is it, other than a government issuing arrests for speech?

[1]: https://evrimagaci.org/gpt/london-braces-for-free-speech-sho...

The vast bulk of those cases are about online harassment, usually against former spouses, public servants, etc. If you are aware of a case where an individual was arrested for just expressing their opinion you are welcome to provide the evidence. Until then this is just FUD. Censorship is bad, protecting the rest of the citizens from harassment is the kind of thing that is actually useful.

What were they arrested for saying?

Are you expecting me to comb through thousands of cases? Obviously they were arrested for saying legal things, if their arrest doesn't follow a conviction in 90% of cases.

If you're going to claim that people get arrested in the UK for criticising the government, it's reasonable to expect you have an example to hand.

I expect that when you say someone was arrested for speech and it's government overreach (as opposed to a legitimate arrest), you should show us the speech they were arrested for, to back up your claim that it's overreach.

> Economic growth or lack of thereof is absolutely irrelevant here

It absolutely is. Being right (and more so, being righteous) is expensive. When you cannot afford to put your money where your mouth is, everyone knows that sooner or later you cannot or will not follow through on your words. Europe hast lost ~30% of power vs. the US in just ~12 years.

> Europe hast lost ~30% of power vs. the US in just ~12 years.

[citation needed] mostly because I'm curious what kind of metric one uses to measure this.

From an economic standpoint, Europe stagnated behind the US coming out of the pandemic, but now it seems to be the US markets that are lagging Europe in the past year.

Militarily, my perception is that Europe is ramping up, not falling off.

GDP EU ÷ GDP US in 2011: ~1

GDP EU ÷ GDP US in 2024: ~0.66

I will give you exact sources for the claim later once I'm back at my laptop, but rest assured: these numbers don't lie. And militarily... really? We're a joke. We cannot even defend our neighbor from being invaded without extensive US help.

GDP, as it's measured right now, is mostly just measuring unreported inflation plus money printing.

Edit: Real wages are mostly measuring unreported inflation but not measuring money printing.

I wont argue that those two things don't exist, but can you show some proof that GDP is measuring nothing else than ("just") those two things, and that there are meaningful differences between the EU and the US with regard to these two things? Is there no unreported inflation and no money printing in the EU? If that were true, we'd see massive devaluation of USD vs. EUR.

Also, if you don't like GDP, you can just look at real wages – same picture.

I mean they've certainly turned their back on classic western values like free speech and expression.

No? We've never had such an absolutist view on the freedom of speech as American Constitution holds. We still have enough of it to keep the political debate open to all points of view though (with a reservation for the paradox of tolerance)

> We still have enough of it to keep the political debate open to all points of view though (with a reservation for the paradox of tolerance)

If you're going to reference Popper go read his work he'd spit in your face for suggesting your current censorship and jailing of citizen is in anyway to fix his "paradox of tolerance".

Noone is being jailed for speech in EU, you are misinformed by your antidemocratic elites. Incarceration rate in Germany is almost 10 times lower than in the US, and prison time is used for really severe cases, not for being mean on Twitter

People are being arrested in Berlin for saying "Palestine will be free"

OK, sure, antisemitism is a different topic, and Germany might have a bit of an overreaching definition of it. Which IMO is understandable given German history, but I agree that this is one topic where Germany's freedom of speech is endangered. It's not something Vance would complain about I guess though.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com