Comment by spaginal
9 years ago
Naivety is thinking you can open the Pandora's box of government limiting speech based on what is popularly acceptable in an emotional moment, and not eventually having any speech against government or incumbent politicians or ideas eventually labeled in the future as hate speech and banned.
The reason you don't go down the path of Europe in this regard is because Europeans are already losing representation, and democracy fails when people aren't free to speak their minds and express their ideas, love it or hate it. That's how a truly free society actually works.
As a European, I feel well-represented. Whatever that means.
And even though I happen to life in a country where anybody waving a swastika in the last 70 years went to jail, I can still criticise the Government in any way I want.
In fact, the Economist, not usually suspected to harbour communists, considers most of Europe to be more democratic than the US: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#Democracy_Inde...
"Europeans are already losing representation"
What does that mean?
In my particular part of Europe we have rather more political representation than we did even 20 years ago.