Comment by zorse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by zorse | Hacker News Reader

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It might be the most foolish law on the books. Does anyone think that someone who hates a racial, ethnic or religious group will all of a change their mind because its against the law?

Laws against anti-semitism lend credibility to proponents of conspiracy theories. "If what I am saying isn't true, they why is the government out to stop me from speaking about it?"

If you look at France in particular the attempt to shut down the comedic routine of dieudonne m'bala m'bala who has a routine that makes fun of the holocaust has likely done orders of magnitude more to stir up anti-semitic sentiment in France than his routine

regarding the anti-islam stuff, its a similar situation, with some important distinctions that I won't get into at the moment. Regardless, silencing anti-islamic sentiment, just as with silencing anti-Semitic sentiment, will only make the situation worse

P.s. its not just in Europe. In Canada we have 'human rights commissions' that can force you to apologize and pay enormous fines and legal fees for 'hate speech'.

You don't get it. It's not just "against the law", like jaywalking. You publicly have those opinions (that imho, have some justification) and the consequences are many :

1) you won't get hired in pretty much any company if they know.

2) you will be fired from the police force and/or army if caught having them.

3) government departments are regularly purged of much less controversial opinions.

4) If you talk about this in a cafe or some such someone will report you to the police who'll find a way to correct this.

5) some decisions you may make can be punished if you are known to have these opinions. Something like the human rights commissions example you gave.

If you're smart and have these opinions, you'll bury them deep down.

I find it funny how this works, and I truly wonder what European socialists are trying to achieve by making this happen. They've already succeeded in making the extreme right comparable in size to the moderate left, and far, far larger than extreme left. And they're driving more and more people away because most of their actions are really about jealousy-driven wrongful accusations within their own people. The right, even extreme right, is currently very open to dissenting opinions and cooperate with eachother even when there exist large rifts in ideology between factions. The cynic in me says that's because they have to be. But it's giving them power.

As to why they do this, having lived there, the answer is extremely obvious : because a big class of people enjoy doing this to other people. It shows they're a good person ... yes, really.

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