Bullshit. That’s not what the laws say and that’s not how any court has ever interpreted them. The hate laws are very specific and very limited in scope, because there is, in fact, a Charter right to free speech. No application of hate speech laws in Canada has ever been controversial, except maybe among white supremacists and anti-semites.
What is it about Canada’s free speech laws, do you think, that would make it impossible for an autocrat to ignore them and do whatever he wants, the way Trump is currently ignoring the US’s free speech laws?
No. Sorry, but just no.
“This is a great organisation.”
“This is an organisation sanctified by the Almighty, and all believers have a sacred obligation to support it.”
These are not exactly the same.
Obviously, nothing, since abuses against free speech have happened in the past in the US and are happening now. But since it has not happened in Canada, what is it, do you think, that has prevented it?
There are several points here (and I know we’ve had these arguments before).
First, it’s important to have free speech enshrined as a personal right because an enumeration of rights is part of the foundation of social order. But it shouldn’t be thought of as any sort of guarantee against tyranny, but rather, a reference point for judicial interpretation in a functional democracy. If you don’t have a working judicial system within a functional democracy, all bets are off.
Second, given a functional democracy, strictly bounded and fairly interpreted laws against hate speech in a functional democracy with a trustworthy judicial system is no risk to anyone except dangerously hateful bigots. It allows dangerous bigots to be dealt with within the lawful bounds of a constitution, instead of making nonsensical excuses like “I don’t agree with you, but I support your right to be a Nazi” and letting them loose, if not to shoot up a synagogue or a gathering of Black people, certainly to encourage others to do so.
So ultimately the key is not how absolutely to phrase the wording of a constitutional free speech provision, but to have a trusted and functional government. Which is sometimes a challenge, to be sure, but constitutional free speech absolutism is obviously not the answer, since it so often has not worked and has often required the tolerance of dangerous bigots. Maybe try electing decent governments instead.
Then why did you respond with “bullshit” to griffin1977’s post?
I misinterpreted the orginal question to mean whether Trump would abuse hate speech laws to prosecute his enemies. Of course he would. He already does, and hate speech laws backed up by a politically skewed Supreme Court that he helped appoint, would likely ensure that he’d be successful at silencing his enemies.
But your question was different. You asked what it was about Canada’s free speech laws that would make it impossible for an autocrat (presumably in Canada) to ignore them “the way Trump is currently ignoring the US’s free speech laws”.
That’s the question I addressed.
Again, there is nothing to prevent a hypothetical Canadian autocrat from abusing Canada’s free speech laws or to unfairly exploit the hate speech laws, if such autocrat also had authoritarian control of the justice system.
But there is everything to prevent such an autocrat from ever coming into power, or, as Trump has done in the US, of skewing the justice system in their favour. And none of that has anything to do with anything written in the Constitution. It’s all about the sociopolitical system and the structure of news organizations, particularly public broadcasters, and thus, ultimately, about an informed public and the kinds of governments that they elect.
ETA: Friggin’ Discourse deleted the quote to show what I was replying to.
My question was predicated on the assumption that you’d actually understood the post to which you were responding. Since that wasn’t the case, my question is moot.
So you think my responses are free of meaningful content about why hate speech laws can be an important part of social justice, and that conversely, absolutist free speech can empower bigotry?
Because free speech, and how absolute it should be, and whether the UK laws may have gone too far, is kinda the topic here.
“Canada’s just different, so that could never happen here,” isn’t a terribly compelling argument. We used to say the same about the US, and look what happened.
But maybe “Canadian Exceptionalism” will work out better for you guys.
The only difference is one puts it in religious terms, the other, because Roger Waters is not a Muslim cleric, does not. I certainly don’t think the law would be fairer if only banned supporting proscribed organizations using muslim religious language but not secular language.
Seriously if freedom of speech protections have an exception for language that might conceivably motivate someone you have never met to commit a crime, you don’t have freedom of speech
If you’re not allowed to publically opine, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent priest?”, do you even have free speech?
The laws that created ICE did not say it was to be used as the president’s personal Gestapo to disappear any non-citizen who says something he disagrees with. They assume the people directing ICE can be trusted not to abuse the power they have. As there is no explicit written law saying you can’t do what trump is doing, he did that.
Fortunately for all Americans there is an explicit unambiguous bill of rights. If there wasn’t do you really think Trump would not have found a prosecutor and 11 jurors who think saying “MAGATs” or “Conservative evangelicals want trans people to die” counts as inciting hate?
No, that’s not the only difference.
Is the difference that locking up someone for the second quote violates both their freedom of speech and their freedom of religion, while locking them up for the first one only violates their freedom of speech?
…my argument here is that this was a “stitch up.”
https://law.loyno.edu/sites/law.loyno.edu/files/Ratner.formatted.pdf
The document makes a much bigger legal argument about why what happened to the Holy Land Five is probably a huge travesty of justice. But I just want to focus on this. Defenders claim the government didn’t prove, as you said, that they “knowingly sent money to Hamas.” They knowingly sent money to Palestinian charities. From the Human Rights Watch summary:
I’m not arguing it’s a perfect one-to-one analogue. But the analogue is there. The government wanted to take this organisation out. So it used the existing framework of laws to do so and clouded it with propaganda. The constitution didn’t protect them. Because the government were going to get them no matter what.
Again: that’s my argument. Lets for the sake of debate accept that the defence arguments, that the Palestinian charities they funded didn’t have any direct connection to Hamas. That means the defendants were jailed for 60 years for…what exactly?
If the US government wants to shut you down and throw you in jail for the rest of your life, they will figure out a way that is entirely constitutional and will convince almost everyone is entirely justified. Just look at how full the prisons are. Look at the militarised police forces. Look at how the Border Patrol have acted since its creation, how ICE is acting right now. The constitution is all nice and all but its fairly easy to work around.
I don’t live in the UK or the US. Where I live, we have an “unwritten constitution.” Our foundational document is a treaty. You would describe it as a “more verbose, more ambiguous, and more wishy washy, alternative.” I don’t think It’s that at all, and I don’t think you’ve made the case that it is.
I think the proscription of Palestine Action is bad. It happened because the Terrorism Act was sloppily written and the UK government exploited it. It was never the intention of the act to target “direct action”. This was debated extensively at the time and the people backing the bill insisted that it wouldn’t be used this way.
The focus should not be on what instrument was used to punish Palestine Action, but the fact that Palestine Action was the target at all. If the UK government didn’t use the terrorism act it would have used something else. Because governments all over the world are targeting pro-Palestine activists and using whatever tools they can to silence them.
It’s the reason why I bought up the Palestinian exception. Because the US government and the UK government and institutions around the world are using every tool at their disposal to silence this particular movement.
I think that’s bad. And I’m waiting to see how this “explicit unambiguous bill of rights” is protecting all of the people who have been targeted here. They’ve lost their jobs. Their education. Some of them got locked up. Some either forcibly deported or self-deported. Some got kicked out of their accommodation. Many got beaten by militarised police. They’ve been blacklisted by potential employers. Doxxed.
All in the “land of the free.”
I think it’s just plain weird how much reverence is put in a document that was written centuries ago by a bunch of long-dead-white-men. Because arguably America is in such a bad position right now because people figured out how to work around that document.
Media and social media ownership is consolidated to just a handful of owners and even though “free speech is protected” what people hear is what those owners want people to hear. We are all wired directly to 24-7 propaganda and its all entirely constitutional.
This is a free speech problem. It’s just a very different free speech problem to the one they are facing in the UK. That’s my argument. Not that one is better or worse than the other. But that both are deeply problematic in very different ways.
Probably not; they are pro-hate, and wouldn’t consider it insulting. They do want to kill all trans people, after all. And at any rate need no such laws to persecute people.
Laws can’t protect you from lawless people that enforce them. The Constitution is dead.
No, not even close.
Yeah. Here in the US, we periodically have people and organizations get censored because Google or Visa or some other big business doesn’t want to allow them to write or say what they want. Places as diverse as TV Tropes and Tumblr have gotten crushed into submission that way. And then you have the example of the Nazification of Twitter under Elon Musk.
Obsessing over government rules is a mistake when corporations can and do shut down speech they don’t like at least as easily. And generally with less legal recourse.
Brit here. I don’t dispute that we have some issues with free speech, but they go both ways: while sometimes legitimate protests get shut down and speech has been censored for what was arguably still just opinion, you also get people inciting and excusing violence, not just against asylum seekers but even the police and somehow getting away with it (looking at you, Farage).
I think prosecuting incitement and support of terrorism is much harder in the modern climate, where an idiot posting a random statement can draw a mob of hundreds wanting to burn down a building.
And what country has solved this issue? Certainly not the US. I know it’s a statement of faith for many that America has true free speech, but it was always disputable and right now prohibitions on speech and protest seem are not just more extensive than in Europe, but very clearly slanted towards a political ideology.
I stopped reading this thread after that. I am bored by spurious arguments and you have a very skewed concept of free speech. Something, I am afraid, that is very common in the USA. See for instance this article from today’s Guardian:
There is a certain Candance Owens which I have not the pleasure to know that claims a lot of BS about other people, including and specially about the French president Macron and his wife. From the article:
The Macrons sought retractions from Owens, the suit says, for the “demonstrably false” claims she has made about them but she instead “mocked them and used them as additional fodder for her frenzied fan base”.
“These outlandish, defamatory, and far-fetched fictions included that Mrs Macron was born a man, stole another person’s identity, and transitioned to become Brigitte; Mrs Macron and President Macron are blood relatives committing incest; President Macron was chosen to be the President of France as part of the CIA-operated MKUltra program or a similar mind-control program; and Mrs Macron and President Macron are committing forgery, fraud, and abuses of power to conceal these secrets.
Owens, of course, pleads the first amendment:
“This is a foreign government attacking the first amendment rights of an American independent journalist. […] In France, politicians can bully journalists, but this is not France. It’s America.”
Therefore I infer that in America, that is, the USA, it is OK when journalists bully politicians, poison the public discourse and simply flat out lie.
Well, if that is free speech for you, I find the concept sick and bad for a society. That, for me, is inciting hatred for lowly reasons. This has as little to do with free speech as the right to carry a weapon in public has to do with freedom. It is disgusting.
I know it has shortcomings, but I much prefer the European model. It at least has the appearance of sanity.
I know I will not convince you so I’ll better leave.