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Comment by jquery | Hacker News Reader

The piece breathlessly describes the West as literally Stalinism. Is anyone being arrested in the middle of the night on trumped up charges? Or are democracies passing laws making it harder for bigots to openly be bigots, and giving them due process when they break the law?

Nobody claimed democracies will pass laws you have to like, it turns out bigotry is wildly unpopular and hard to defend, so without a First Amendment, free speech tends to become circumscribed. Democracies can pass awful laws, yes. But what is the breathless author presenting as an alternative?

Edit: and here come the downvotes by people who believe I’m committing wrongthink by pointing out its mostly bigotry being targeted.

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> Nobody claimed democracies will pass laws you have to like, it turns out bigotry is wildly unpopular and hard to defend, so without a First Amendment, free speech tends to become circumscribed. Democracies can pass awful laws, yes. But what is the breathless author presenting as an alternative?

You said it in the first sentence quoted: a First Amendment.

In this case, of course, a Fourth Amendment and a Fifth Amendment also help a great deal.

This may be pedantic, but the author did not present the First Amendment as an alternative, and in fact excoriated America as an authoritarian state no better than China.

China has a first amendment very similar to America’s. However, they don’t have rule of law or an independent judiciary so its constitution is less meaningful than the USA’s.

Are we reading the same comment?

Downvotes are more appropriate than 7 years of prison.

State mandated morality worked so well in previous centuries. Why should bigotry be a crime?

What's a bigot? What's a law?

What's happening is the average person's quality of legal life is falling. Most people are not terrorists, they are spied on as such. Most people are not abusive partners, they are taught wild sex ed. Most people are not racists, the nanny state is handling us as such.

Your mistake was falling for the virtue signalling and forgetting it's about state control. And yes, Scotland wants to put people in jail for saying words out loud (trumped up charges) purely out of hearsay (stalinism).

They arrested a man for teaching his dog to imitate the Nazi salute.

> it turns out bigotry is wildly unpopular and hard to defend, so without a First Amendment, free speech tends to become circumscribed.

So is being a jerk. Want to criminalize it? Oh, and I get to define what 'jerk' means, and against which groups acting as one is not allowed. We'll call them 'protected groups', for brevity.

>So is being a jerk. Want to criminalize it?

The history of laws passing in democracies is largely that of jerks getting told they can't do some jerky thing anymore. A semi-recent example would be sexual harassment. It used to just be considered normal, then it became kind of a "jerk" behavior, but has since become criminal. Norms evolve.

Last week on hacker news we had a headline stating young people are having less sex than ever. And people were right, a lot of youngsters are afraid of all the overblown drama. Is kissing sexual harassment? Sexting? Having sex without written consent?

Non-trivial jerky behavior is completely contextual on a per community basis, and a government could not and should not act on that. Out of scope.

Your hypothesis is it’s because of government regulations. I doubt it. It probably has a lot more to do with the smart device in their pocket. Sex is a form of entertainment and all forms of entertainment are struggling for our attention. Also services like OnlyFans are encouraging women to monetize their sexuality and young men tend to be cash poor. That’s my hypothesis anyway.

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