Comment by FergusArgyll
1 year ago
I don't want to start a shouting match and have to prove my case for every country but this is from Wikipedia.
"Hate speech, obscenity, and defamation are common categories of restricted speech in Canada. During the 1970 October Crisis, the War Measures Act was used to limit speech from the militant political opposition."
That isn't evidence that Canada barely considers free speach "good in and of itself."
Different countries have different rules and restrictions on free speech and every country has some. If you setup a framework for comparison, you can rank them, but this doesn't always end up with the USA on top and often it's not even in the top 10. Canada often ranks over the USA.
Your assertion is thus pretty clearly not true by the best objective measures we have.
What do you think of the trucker protests and how they were handled? I find it hard to believe any Canadian can honestly claim that Canada has more free speech than the US.
I agree with some parts of how it was handled and strongly disagree with others.
The USA also has had plenty its own issues with blocking speech. Few people know that the origin of the "shouting fire in a crowded theater" metaphor was coined by the supreme court to justify cracking down on political dissent.
I don't think it's particularly useful to attempt compare levels of free speech between the two countries without laying out a clear framework under which to do the comparison. There are organizations that do this, though you may or may not agree with the framework they use.
Free speech doesn't mean unlimited speech. In the US you are not free to defraud, slander, physically endanger, etc. And everywhere, in everything, there are failures and imperfections.
If "hate speech and obscenity" aren't covered by free speech protections, what is?
The freeness of speech is a continuum. In some countries you can't say anything critical of the ruling party, even if it's true. In other countries you can say untrue and critical things as long as you don't know they are untrue. The standards and penalties for defamation and libel are an important part of the freeness of speech.
Countries have different standards for what qualifies as obscenity and what the consequences are.
Countries have different standards for what types of hate speech are allowed.
Freedom of Speech isn't a binary value.
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I don't understand your question. We can list many things that are protected, but you know that. You also know that sometimes we don't execute perfectly, including on free speech. So I'm a bit lost ...
Off the top of my head:
* critique of arguments for the existence of God (reasonable or otherwise)
* critiques of national policy of a given political party (reasonable or otherwise)
* reporting on the alleged wrongdoing of a powerful political official
* allegations of infidelity of people considered royalty within a given country
* finding and reporting security bugs in medical devices that use proprietary software
* satire
* propaganda
* thought experiments
* standing in a public square and lying about established facts of science
**
If you can categorize the speech and its not in the category of yelling fire in a crowded theater, I bet it's protected by the 1st Amendment.
Edit: clarification
Edit 2: Since this is HN and you didn't specify 1st Amendment in your question, let me be pedantic and add an empty bullet point for a type of speech that is protected by the 5th amendment:
*
Edit 3: I think my empty string is in the wrong scope. One must invoke the fifth amendment by speaking. So the bullet point should look like this:
* invoking the fifth amendment to say this: (NUL byte goes here)
:)
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