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Comment by cjrp | Hacker News Reader

How many of those 30 are unarguably "bad" posts though? Threats of violence and so forth.

250 years ago some people made some bad posts about throwing some tea into the harbor. Calling for revolution isn't a bad post.

Big fucking difference between saying you want to throw some tea into a harbor vs inciting that hotels containing asylum seekers should be burnt down.

That's charitable to say that nobody was saying anything except for "let's drown that tea".

Weird that you think it was legal for people to say "kill the king" back then.

Buddy you aren't addressing the comments that are replying to you.

You gotta stay on-topic. You keep coming up with random things to compare to that make no sense to anybody but you. Who said it was legal to say "kill the king"?

Diffrence being state did not have control to stop disgruntled people from organizing. And it might be that preventing such formations is actually detrimental long run.

The state did everything they could to prevent it back then, just as they do right now.

Everything they could was a lot less back before the fruits of industrial productivity allowed people to have their basic needs met while giving a huge fraction of their surplus to the state to do what it pleases with.

Using this line of argumentation, you might as well start enslaving (sorry, “impressing”) people into your navy again.

Yes, and perfect law enforcement is much worse than society than spotty law enforcement, because spotty law enforcement is how all societal progress got made.

Imagine if we jailed every gay person the moment they had a gay thought. How legal do you think being gay would be now?

I mean, in terms of property damage, the Boston Tea Party was a pretty big deal. Probably in arson territory in today's dollars.

This comment is remarkable in its lack of nuance. There's a huge spectrum of, let's call it, aggressive speech, ranging from trying to organize against an oppressive figure or class, to just punching down against people and groups who have either done nothing to the author of that speech which warrants an aggressive response, or where the target of that speech is already a victim.

My opinion is that free-speech absolutism is a policy position that causes much more harm than good, and which erodes social cohesion. There should be perpetual debate about where we as a society accept where the line is between speech which is allowed and that which is disallowed.

And to wit, on the tea party analogy: how's that working for the US now?

>There's a huge spectrum of, let's call it, aggressive speech, ranging from…

Why do you talk like that?

Are you one of the redditors that has been invading this heterodox environment.

>There's a spectrum of aggressive speech, ranging from

Is sufficient and much less cringe.

I'd argue that nothing is "inarguable"

And I'd argue that human dignity shall be inviolable

Define dignity

The chronically online anti-uk folks like to turn a blind eye to anything that’s justifiable for matter of principal.

It’s why the US has such a problem with gun control and laws.

I could argue everyone should have guns, and it’s just bad people, right?

Right. Switzerland has 100x guns per capita than UK and 2x less intentional homicides than UK.

Why are we comparing Switzerland? Do you want to try again with the United States?

Let me give it a go; Switzerland has higher gun homicides than the UK.

If 27/30 meet the bar for "bad" is that an acceptable level of policing speech? 19/30?

I dislike harassing, threats, hate speech and everything wrong that people yell to other people.

But I dislike even more that we decide that the solution to it is to pass laws prohibiting speech, and even more that the ones in charge of passing those laws are very incentivised to prohibiting criticism to themselves or their policies or their ideologies.

Why is speech a specific, precise red line? Yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre (and I'm aware that the case which coined this phrase was completely stupid, but the phrase itself stands) should probably not be legal, even though it is speech.

Why not? If shouting “fire” causes no harm, what’s the issue? And if it causes harm, isn’t that adequately served by civil lawsuits? Not everything on earth needs to be a criminal matter.

You reckon a lot of crimes should be torts instead, eh? Which ones?

I think in the US we have a pretty good balance of it. The problem is enforcing the laws we have, and narrowing them so strict enforcement will not be burdensome, not adding new ones.

Everyone here subconsciously understands that most laws are only intended to apply to people who regularly cause problems, and that creates an unjust system, especially when “causing problems” starts to include political activity.

I think misdirecting people to create a panic is illegal no matter what. One should always be liable for the consequences of their actions.

The line gets s lot blurrier when you call fo arson and someone acts on it and burns down a building. Should you be liable for the actions of the third party that burnt down the building? Imho there's some responsibility to be held, yes, despite you only calling for it.

But I wouldn't want anybody to wield the power to legally shut down other people. The amount of abuse that can generate in the wrong hands is Tremendous (see what I did there?)

I don't know, but the UK has criminalized expressions of support for Palestine Action.

They're dragging grannies off to prison just for holding up signs, and literally accusing them of supporting terrorism.

Well they proscribed PA, and showing support for a proscribed organisation _is_ a crime.

But should that be possible?

Many (perhaps even most) countries ban public acts of support for what they consider to be terrorist organisations.

For example, the USA maintains a list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and penalities for providing support to those organisations are rather more severe than the in the UK.

Whether or not Palestine Action should be proscribed is a different matter - their most serious action to date has been simply damaging military aircraft. Personally, I'd tend to say that proscription is too harsh a response for property damage with no violence against a person.

I guess in the US that anyone doing something similar would simply have been killed, rather than their organisation being banned. That's not exactly great either!

> Whether or not Palestine Action should be proscribed is a different matter

No, that's actually the heart of the matter.

Palestine Action is not a terrorist organization. Full stop. This isn't even arguable.

Labeling them a terrorist organization and then arresting anyone who expresses support for them is a massive abuse of terrorism laws and an attack on the very heart of freedom of speech.

A terrorist organisation is whatever your government says is a terrorist organisation. Always has been always will be - there's no objective measure.

Both of which are unthinkable in a normal democracy.

They called PA a terrorist organization, which is an insult to everyone's intelligence.

Then they carried out mass arrests of people protesting that decision.

Democracies don't do that.

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