Between FISC, the Patriot Act/USA Freedom Act, and such it doesn't seem like the US constitution is doing a good job at protecting anyone. There is a long wikipedia article named Mass surveillance in the United States, but not yet one for the EU.
I don’t disagree. But there is still far more protection for free speech in the US than in the EU, where wrongthink is not acceptable to the powers that be. It is a huge regression and for some reason, culturally Europe seems to be modeling itself more after China than the US, with whom it shares more history and values.
i have lived in all three places (15 years in china) and i have to respond with an empathic no.
what we are seeing is that thanks to social media, more discourse is public. which leads to more prosecutions. that is not a regression. that stuff has always been prosecuted. and they go against hate speech, not wrong think.
hate speech is no clearly defined, so maybe we need to talk about that. wikipedia translates the german term "Volksverhetzung" to "incitement to hatred", but that's not actually a good translation, because it rather means "incitement to hatred against a whole people". besides that here is strong language directed against individuals that is designed to hurt them. in germany that is defined as insult to your honor or dignity and incitement to violence. the devil is in the details of course, and there are many expressions that are borderline and depend on context. but i think we can agree that such speech is generally not wanted. whether it should be punished is another question, but in my opinion "wrong think" goes way beyond what i described here. one topic that does go beyond hate speech that may be problematic is expressions that threatens the democracy. i couldn't find any good examples for that yet other than democracy being threatened by radicalization, polarization and political violence. so presumably anything that leads to that, most of which is already covered by hate speech.
I don’t agree with that. Inciting violence is wrong. Lying is wrong. But pointing out crime figures of for example the imported migrant Muslims is true, yet also hate speech?
I think we’re far beyond hate speech being thought crime. It also means you can’t be honest about your reasons or viewpoint, thereby poisoning the public debate.
i can't comment on specific examples without knowing more details about the context and what actually happened. the problem in such cases is often that crime figures are cited in isolation without comparing them to local crime figures as if there was no local crime or ignoring the fact that a lot of "crime" by immigrants is violations against immigration law. something a local can't possibly violate. i understand the same thing is happening in the US. so yes, if you twist statistics to deliberately make immigrants look worse than they are, then that is hate speech.
if that is not what you are talking about then we will have to look at he actual numbers being pointed out and the message they come with and the response to that.
The problem is that already some countries, including Germany, are not reporting on the background of criminals anymore because it could lead to hate speech.
Customs officers everywhere have almost unlimited discretion to deny entry.
While I think the Vance meme reflects very poorly on my country, it is always advisable to remember that you have very limited rights in every country while crossing the border and that it best not to piss off the officers. Travel StackExchange is filled with Q&A’s about how to what to do when the customs officials of various rich countries apply their discretion to deny entry, often for reasons even more petty than having a meme.
I have long campaigned against Fourth Amendment violations in the US, but to compare the US and the EU is laughable. The difference is night and day in every aspect, from constitutional rights to privacy (virtually worthless in most EU constitutions vs quite broad in the US) to practical surveillance (far deeper and broader in the EU) to court requirements for access for typical requests (commonplace in the US, rare in the EU.)
As an example of one of those points, the US right to privacy was long considered so broad that it served as the _foundation of the right to abortion_ in the US for decades! By contrast, to pick an EU example, the Dutch right to privacy is so weak that it is quite literally written into the Dutch constitution as “except as limited by law”; in other words, nearly worthless.
To compare them by presence of a Wikipedia page is beyond ridiculous.
Your address and phone number are publicly available with a Google search. I've been stalked and had someone show up at my house after moving (and I have zero social media presence) because, for some reason, my personal info was all online and easily found by googling my name.
People can take a video of you, shame you for some random thing, and have your face and name known to millions by the end of the day.
The NSA can access all your online data and share it with whoever they want. Companies do it on their behalf as well. Cops can dig through your car just by saying it smells funny.
A right to privacy somehow was construed as the right to an abortion. But the right to privacy never meant you have the right to keep anything private. In some other countries, you can easily have your data taken down from public view online and sue (and win against) people who violate that right. That's an uphill battle in the US.
American freedom is general is based on “might makes right”, whether that’s the well armed gunslinger in the old west, the lawyered up millionaire in the courts, or the billion dollar company using their freedom of speech to obliterate yours.
Everyone has the same freedom to use their resources to maximise that freedoms to help with where the fiat meets the nose.
Just double checking...we agree that this is suboptimal, right? Since might does not in fact equal (moral) right?
I'm not arguing for any previous arguments here, just want to argue that "might makes right" is a very dangerous system.
Strawman-ing: It sounds like the argument is "might implies right because you must have done something right to get that money"
There's a lot wrong with that. You didn't earn the money often, because inheritance. And we're assuming the "right" things you did to earn that money for capitalism maps somehow to "right" things for humanity, which obviously isn't a direct 1-1.
And imagine that logic flipped: "Less might makes less right" -> "less might implies less right because you must have done something wrong to not have money". Like, say that to a 5 year old, poor descendent of slaves.
But again, I'm strawman-ing. Just wanted to get that out there.
Americans have the right to privacy "except as limited by capitalism". For example, your location history and purchasing history are actively sold for the ad industry. No it is not sufficiently anonymized.
FISA and patriot act are very controversial, the EU doing the same thing but far worse isn’t a good argument to stand on merely because the US gets talked about more on Wikipedia and therefore the press (which is one of the primary acceptable sources for a wiki article). Not to mention places like Germany and France did much of what NSA was doing back in the 2000s, often with even more leeway.
If anything censorship and extensive government oversight of peoples lives in EU and UK is far less controversial so there isn’t much of a push back. As you can see every time this comes up on HN where people in the EU defend it.
