Your fellow citizens can be just as harmful to your freedoms as the gov't; and actually maintaining any freedom requires actively limiting the freedom of other people to infringe on that, and enforcing that limitation.
You cant have it both ways. Limits on government force are inverse to limits on it's people. The Bill Of Rights is a list of things we want to remember that the gov can never do (see it's preamble), it's a bit of a bug that it's called that. Gov is special, we _give_ it the ability to use violence to enforce the rules we set. Corporations don't get to use violence to enforce their rules (unless they buy the gov in a country without the 2ndA). It's a real difference. We are not forced to use a private service (which is why conservatives are so anti forced "health care"), nobody is required to use FB, or YT. Only confused (or ill) people think they are.
A properly functioning system of exchange regulates this via monetary physics. FB is going to be myspace sooner or later. People learn from their mistakes if they have the freedom to make them.
Money like code, is ultimately speech. I'll take that any day over the alternative limitations as long as we have legit voting and non-forced spending of money.
that may be an accepted legal viewpoint in the USA but it is not the truth
> I can become a one man corporation
In truth you can't, because you will still be a person. Its just that in addition there will be a corporation consisting solely of one person. You may notice that when you incorporate, the corporation does not get a vote and neither does your vote get removed. You may notice that you can incorporate several times and this still does not affect your status as a person.
Exactly. It's pretty hard to argue being a corporation is somehow special, our courts correctly recognized that. I agree with your second paragraph completely.
So how does it work?
Because that's literally why corporate personhood exists: To be able to sue companies.
And I find it very illuminating that the only response demonstrates ignorance.
In fact, I'm looking at the federal rules of US civil procedure right now, and they say nothing about 'personhood' being required to take action. They say "A civil action is commenced by filing a complaint with the court" and it has a specific section called "SERVING A CORPORATION, PARTNERSHIP, OR ASSOCIATION" and it goes on and on about officers, general agents, representing attorneys, and other such appointed persons who will become involved in such a case.
So perhaps you should actually take a look at the law before you accuse others of ignorance.
Not really, no. It's frequently gerrymandered and considerable effort is put into making it harder for some people to vote than others. The count is probably legitimate, except where questionable machine voting systems are in place.
What makes HN topics and discussions interesting are the diffs from other topics and discussions. Therefore the generic is what we're most trying to avoid.
More here if anyone wants it: https://hn.algolia.com/?sort=byDate&dateRange=all&type=comme....
It gives them "freedom to" blast their music. However it definitely takes away my "freedom from" having to hear that shit.
And I think this is why young people are libs and older people are more conservative - probably the exact reason actually. When I was young I never blasted my music, but I also didn't care if others did. Now I'm older and I definitely hate hearing other's music blasting everywhere - no matter where I am. So I NOW want a government that would limit others blasting their music.
It really sucks that simple things like are also things people go to war for. I'm not kidding, if the government tomorrow issued a decree saying that blasting music is punishable by 10 years in prison, the US would literally be at war and millions would die.
Instead we settle for individual cities making noise ordinances and hoping that it's not challenged in court.
Despite having bans on certain kinds of speech, Germany is overall freer than the USA, and scores higher on every free-press index that matters.
To borrow computer science terminology, I think "history should be append-only."
On the other side google censors a lot of stuff all the time for various reasons (political stuff from ISIS, copyrighted material, random YouTube videos), and the first amendment does only mandate that the state can’t curb free speech, not private companies that do it all the time.
The law enforcement agencies keep track of what's important regarding my history, not google. And you shouldn't feel entitled to information about myself which I don't want to be made public.
I feel like this article missed that the "right to be forgotten" is meant to cover speech that is true.
It sounds backwards as the US leans more towards personal freedoms than societal freedoms, but the most powerful amendments don't protect people outright. They just protect them from the government.
And as is often the case with sweeping generalizations, it stereotypizes and oversimplifies reality.
Eg. read about the toll the infamous thalidomide took in Germany vs. in the US, and for what reasons.
The Wikipedia article is comprehensive - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thalidomide
One of the interesting bits:
> After the Nazi regime with its Law for the Prevention of Hereditarily Diseased Offspring used mandatory statistical monitoring to commit various crimes, western Germany had been very reluctant to monitor congenital disorders in a similarly strict way.
The people who hold European values today, whatever that might mean, today aren’t the same people from 100 years ago.
The only one that comes to my mind is shared with US: that power must be distributed among several institutions so that it becomes difficult to establish a dictatorship.
Off the top of my head: https://www.theblaze.com/news/2012/03/22/simply-visiting-ter...
Even if the EU already existed, it would be better to talk about more recent facts as the "spirit of the times" (there must be a word in German for that) changes.
There is. It's "Zeitgeist", a term that AFAIK has also been introduced into the English language.
> I think this is quite indicative of European and the US values. The US generally values the freedom to, while Europe values freedom from
The reply that prompted me to jump in didn't question this view; just generalized it in a way I'm very sceptical about:
> I generalize it as the US protects companies, the EU protects people.
It's easy to poke holes in this generalization, even without needing a clear-cut definition of what European values are, exactly.
> We were talking about laws, thus more like EU vs US. In that case, Germany in the 50s was not in the EU.
The laws reflect the spirit, so to speak, and while the EU as such didn't exist in 1950s, its "alpha version", the European Coal and Steel Community, of which Germany was a founding state, did. The process was already on.
The Paneuropean modern idea of a united continent is almost 100 years old. The EU is an outcome of a long and difficult process, not something that just came to existence in 1992, in a form that happened to trendily reflect the spirit of the 90s ;)
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/08/science/frances-oldham-ke...
The other is a general trust of the justice system. "Hate speech" as a legal concept would be abhorrent in the US. 1A aside, it feels like no-one trusts the state to reasonably decide where the line between free speech & hate speech lays, so you simply don't allow it to - Whereas we're much more prone to allow judges to make these judgements.
Of course there's exceptions, how boring the world would be if there weren't. (eg, "I know it when I see it" is a line most famously attributed to a Supreme Court Justice, while the concept behind it finds itself much more at home on the other side of the pond). But the trends seem clear.
(This isn't to beat my chest and admire how much better we think we are - I do think both sides could stand to learn something from the other.)
That's what strong laws against bribing and abuse of influence along with proportional representation voting systems tend to get you: governments that are quite inclined to listen to the People (there are varying degrees of democracy, and some European countries are more democratic than others).
Meanwhile, in the US, the People's Voice tends to have zero impact on what type of laws Congress passes:
Before reducing everything to partisan politics, try some empathy.
I mean, correct me if I'm wrong, but what I was responding to is your statement which I read as "the difference between an abortion and homicide is that we don't consider a fetus as an alive human". To which I responded by saying that if it was the only difference, capital punishment, euthanasia and other stuff would be considered homicide too, as the fact that the subject of these procedures is an "alive human" seems insufficient to consider these cases as homicides.
I'm afraid I'm not understanding whether you're telling me I'm right, I'm wrong or arguing another point entirely. Can you please help me understand?
(I hope I don't come across as belligerant or condescending because neither of those is my intention, I'm genuinely trying to understand your point of view and what you're saying. Also, as you may have understood, English is not my native language, so I may be missing something in my reading of your comments)
All I'm saying is that the previous commenter [0] was making a tautological error:
> Abortion is definitely harmful to a human life.
When a woman and her doctor commit a legal abortion, they are ostensibly not doing so thinking that the fetus/embryo is a human being. Roe v. Wade argued that "the word 'person,' as used in the 14th Amendment, does not include the unborn" [1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16757245
[1] https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general...
If you don't understand why POLITICAL_LABEL_X opposes POLITICAL_TOPIC_Y, it's unproductive to assume they're just being hypocrites.
Their values may differ from yours. Maybe try asking them why.
They can only hold that view by dismissing the point of view that it does hurt others. By ending a human life. Nothing hypocritical (aka "convenient") about it.
What on earth does constitutional authority have to do with it? Hold the word salad and stick to the meat.
Abortion is a safe, legal medical procedure, and does not involve killing or children.