[widdershins] Amazing... and yet we still survive...

[drag sidious]

On Wed, 2004-10-13 at 14:12, nicolas vigier wrote:
> On Thu, 14 Oct 2004, Ben McGinnes wrote:
> 
> > nicolas vigier(boklm at mars-attacks.org)@Wed, Oct 13, 2004 at 06:59:30PM +0200:
> > > On Tue, 12 Oct 2004, drag sidious wrote:
> > > 
> > > > myself to the EU or China's government myself. I can do and say things
> > > > in this country that would get me arrested in countries with lesser
> > > > garentees on free speech, such as Germany or France. Stuff that.
> > > 
> > > Hmm, are you sure there are less garentees on free speech in Germany and
> > > France ? At least there is not (yet ?) something like DMCA.
> > 
> > Yeah, both of those countries have some interesting legacies from
> > World War II.  Or rather, from immediately following the war.  Certain
> > restrictions meant to prevent the rise of Nazism again, particularly
> > in Germany.
> > 
> > As for France, it's had some pro-secular/anti-religion laws since the
> > Revolution (ref. no Muslim scarves in schools).
> 
> Yes, overt religious symbols are not allowed in public schools, but you
> are free to do what you want outside school, or in private schools.
> I don't really think we can talk about lesser garentees on free speech
> because of this law, you are still free to have the religion you like.
> 
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With Germany it's more then just trying to supress left over remnents
from Ww2, but it's beginning to spread to ban all forms of "hate"
speech.

It is a good thing to a certain extent, but what constitutes "hate"
speech? It's very subjective and will invariably lead to minority voices
being squashed and ideas suppressed. Of course they are only going to
pick on ideas/speech that are very very distastefull and negative.
Religious speech that may promote rascism, for instance.

Plus now your not only dealing with Germany, when you live in Germany,
but now you have the European Union being established as a higher form
of government. Which, personally, I would find much more scary then
retardation like the DMCA or patriot act.

There already have been rumbling between the US Government (Bush
administration) and the EU from them trying to get the US to join in on
filtering parts of the internet to supress distastefull ideas and forms
of speech.

Of course the US could never possibly join in on something like that (at
least until people are convinced that "freedom of speech" is as
meaningless/narrow in it's definition as "the right to keep and bare
arms"), but apparently most European countries have no problem with this
sort of supression of speech.

See:
http://www.wired.com/news/business/0,1367,56294,00.html?tw=wn_story_related

The US has some very bad mojo going that we have to paraniod about,
definately. But it's a much more serious problem in places outside the
US in terms of freedom of speech.

Vigilance is something everybody needs to excersice instead of knee-jerk
"bush is teh cheney's bitch"/"US is teh suck" type things that seems
very popular nowadays. There are big political forces that we need to be
very scared about. Chinese have almost perfected their methods of
filtering and banning out most of the internet, As does many Middle
eastern countries. It would suck if similar barriers formed themselves
between western Europe and the rest of the world.