All of libertarianism is impossible without a complete dictatorship. Interestingly one of the first people to every realize that and say it out loud was a highly regarded conservative.
History lesson follows: Back in the 1970's after the democratically elected but left-leaning Salvadore Alende's government was overthrown in a coup by Pinochet, major libertarian economist F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman basically wrote his economic policy. Pinochet did the whole republican pipe dream. He destroyed the welfare state. He cut taxes on the rich. He locked the currency to the dollar and declared war on inflation. He got rid of practically every regulation (in between he killed tens of thousands of people rather brutally but lets' focus on the economics). It was called the "Chilean Miracle" - the country's GDP growth rate shot up to amazing levels, it looked set to rapidly become the wealthiest country in South America ! It seemed too good to be true. And Hayek set off to Britain to use those numbers to sell the idea to Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher went over the list, looked at the amazing results in Chile, and listened to Hayek and then adopted quite a few of Pinochet's policies. Hayek ranted that only adopting SOME of those policies would not achieve the same good results and Thatcher told him: it's impossible to do more than a few. Chile is a dictatorship, Britain is a democracy. You can ONLY do the full libertarian recipe for an economy in a dictatorship - it's impossible in a liberal democracy over a free people. The tail of the story is that it turned out the Chilean miracle actually WAS to good to be true - it literally never happened. What DID happen is that, in the absence of any significant taxes bankers had nothing to discourage padding their profit margins to drive up share prices, and in the absence of basically any regulation of the finance industry: there was no way to catch them doing it. Soon every banker was reporting massively greater profits than any of them were actually making. In reality - none were making much more than they had been making under Alende - and the entirety of that massive GDP growth consisted of nothing but flagrant lies on balance sheets - bankers pretending they made much more profit that never existed, driving up their share prices and getting a lot richer. By 1982 investors started getting fishy, some started investigating... and discovered the fraud- and the Chilean economy collapsed into tatters.
The greatest libertarian economic experiment of all time did not yield a single penny in growth - all it did was to produce perhaps the greatest scale of bankfraud in human history (Seriously - it made the subprime crises look like somebody misplaced the petty cash). Somebody else based his ideology on the Chilean miracle - and never altered it even after the miracle was shown to be nothing but smoke and mirrors, Ronald Reagan.
And, in a very real sense, that's how the world we live in now was born.
>Gee... I wonder why that would be? Could it possibly be because of 'catastrophic man-made global warming' alarmists? Sorry - 'climate change' alarmists?
Nope. Firstly that group of people don't EXIST (the term 'alarmist' is not accurate unless the threat isn't real) and secondly the decline of coal had nothing to do with them anyway. That was driven entirely by the availability of cheap natural gas. Which fucking sucks for people who want something done about climate change since gas is only a tiny bit cleaner than coal. We'd rather have NEITHER - but we didn't kill coal, we wish we did, it got killed by a cheaper fossil fuel.
Honestly - if the Uranium miners were the ones being retrained it would be an even BIGGER story. Uranium mining is seriously dirty business, it's by far the most environmentally destructive resource to mine - mining coal is bad, but uranium mining is worse. I'm not factoring in climate change here- just the damage from the mining - but saving that damage is a huge boon for the environment.
It's not the story though - because as you yourself say, the uranium mining is still booming, that implies the uranium miners are still employed, but there's probably not enough jobs there to employ everybody who used to work in coal - so another boom industry that creates lots of jobs is a pretty good thing for the county economically, the environment locally and the society at large (on multiple levels: less money needed for welfare in the region saves other taxpayers money, less climate change benefits everybody etc. etc.).
Ultimately both industries have another major advantage over coal as a local keystone industry: a lot less people dying young from blacklung.
>This shows one of the major problems with wind farming, the things are high maintenance. Yeah ! A windfarm's maintenance is like... almost 5% as much as that of a coal plant !
Plants, like everything else, evolve for the environment they exist in. Increased CO2 only increases plant yields within a fairly narrow band - the same band that's existed for the past twenty million years or so. Outside that band it harms plants, too little harms them obviously but so does too much - just as living in an excessively high oxygen environment is harmful to animals. Of course, if the oxygen level changes significantly - animals do evolve to live in the new ranges, but that takes millions of years, pretty much everything that lived beforehand dies off - and new species replace them. The last time there was a huge change was in the carboniferous era - the evolution of wooded plants produced plant matter that nothing at the time could digest, so when those trees died, they didn't rot and return their carbon as carbon-dioxide and take the oxygen they had produced back out of the atmosphere - they just lay there until they got buried by geology. Those trees became the fossil fuels we use today.
But they had an impact on the environment, not being carbon neutral they pushed the oxygen level way up - it peaked at almost 40% of the atmosphere. Basically every animal that had thrived before the carboniferous went extinct - and evolution produced new animals that could live in that environment. Book lungs became a lot more efficient and we saw giant insects thriving. There was a dragonfly with a 1m wingspan, and it's likely that the biggest arachnids of all time lived then - it was the one time in history it was possible for a spider to survive if it's much bigger than a tarantula because the atmosphere was so oxygen rich. Sadly spiders don't fossilize well or often so we don't know if there WERE giant spiders, but it's likely.
Eventually new bacteria evolved that COULD digest wood, trees began to rot - and gradually the atmosphere returned to an in-balance level of about 21% oxygen. All the giant insects and arachnids promptly went extinct as their lungs simply could not breath at this new lower level.
The same is true for plants, massive changes in the CO2 level only increase yields for a little while - beyond a given point it greatly REDUCES yields.
We're evolved for the world as it is, within a fairly narrow band and with very gradual change. Rapid change like we're doing now is a nightmare. Sure we could probably adapt, it's probably not an extinction level event for us - but it's going to be massively disruptive. Millions, perhaps billions, will die. Most of them killing each other for resources. Look at the political fallout that just a few million refugees have caused in Europe (where, in a population of over a billion - they are a rounding error). Can you imagine the outcome of BILLIONS of refugees ? It's easy to say we can 'adapt' - it's insane to think adapting will be cheaper than replacing fossil fuels, and it's REALLY insane to think it will happen without massive loss of life.
Humanity will (probably) survive, but civilization DEFINITELY cannot.
And yet those laws are rarely, if ever, enforced and the bigger a corporation the less likely it is that the law will be enforced.
This creates a stratified society where the law only applies to some - where there is a class that is above the law, and that can, will and does lead to atrocities.
This is why I am opposed to corporations flaunting any laws, even bad ones - not least because there is no universal agreement on what laws as bad. I think most citizens believe that throwing poison in drinking water is a bad thing to do that should be against the law. American coal mines apparently don't agree - and recently their puppets in congress has made it legal for them to do so. They obviously consider it a bad law - most other citizens don't agree, surely whether it's legal or not should not be determined by how rich the people with the opinion are ? Denying speech to the collective is one way to equalise lobbying power a bit. So that the many who would be harmed are not drowned out by the few who would gain. The republican's justification for making that legal was "it doesn't happen anyway". They must think we are all fools. If it genuinely didn't happen before it was against the law, and wasn't going to happen now that it's legal again- then the law had no impact. A law that nobody WANTS to break cannot possibly be a bad law, or a good law, it's at best neutral and should one exception arise then you have it to deal with things. If their claim was true - then this was, in fact, the PERFECT law - a law that didn't intrude on anything anybody wanted to do anyway. Nobody lobbies to get rid of a law they don't want to break. Expect a lot of people to start dying from poisoned water in the near future.
To show that I sincerely and utterly enjoy mixing with people of many cultures.
If people are protesting something you don't agree with, do a counter protest.
I live in a city that's 30% Muslim, has been for centuries, we all get along great. And I would feel quite saddened if our beloved Muslim fellow citizens were removed. Their art and music has shaped the sight and sound of the city. Their architecture has made it beautiful. And on top of that one of the most ethnically mixed cities in the world.
Multiculturarilism is the natural consequence of living and genuinely interacting with, forming human connections with, people of many cultures. That's when you start to realise that your common humanity exceeds your cultural differences - that they are all just like you, just people, just trying to put food on the table.
And, of course, Muslims will have to adapt a little when living in European cities -but you can't expect them to be the ONLY ones adapting - you also need to adapt in order to accomodate. But trust me, your cities will be better if you do. Multiculturalism doesn't just mean you get adopt the best of their culture - it means sharing the best of yours with them too. Doing only the first half is known as "cultural appropriation" and it's fairly significantly evil thing to do. It's basically genocide on the instalment plan.
I truly don't agree with your assessment. Every right ends where it would intrude on somebody else's rights. So noise nuisance laws are justified as their absence would intrude on other people's rights. Sexuality, in any context, cannot possibly intrude on the rights of anybody. After all - if you don't like it, you could just change the channel.
>Censorship in Germany is trying to suppress ideas Actually, no, it is not. Though it may look like that to the uninformed. The limited censorship in Germany is - just like noise nuisance laws - protecting the rights of others. Germany recognises that the first phase of the holocaust was denying the humanity of some and removing their human dignity. So - in an effort to never repeat their biggest shame, they wish to prevent it from the very first phase. They recognise human dignity as a constitutional right - and censor speech only where that speech would intrude on this right. Even then, they go to great lengths to keep the limitations as narrow as possible, make exceptions for artistic expression and try to persuade those who hold such ideas rather than jail them. Holocaust denial is an idea that is provably, factually false. That is only expressed by those who wish to pretend Nazism was a great success and which greatly injures the dignity of those who survived that horror and still has to live with the trauma of it. You called it "relatively harmless" - I call it "justified".
The question of justification is a legal one, which is not answered by lawmakers but by the judicial branch in free countries - giving citizens the means to challenge the justifiability of a law. Perhaps, one day, somebody would bring a case to the German high court and argue that all holocaust survivors are now long dead - this idiotic law no longer protects their dignitiy since they aren't there to be harmed, it's no longer justifiable. Perhaps one day the court will agree. This law is not carved in stone.
But America has censorship on moralistic grounds, of things that cannot and does not intrude on anybody else's rights. America is the land of victimless crimes and this has created the largest per capita prison population in the world - and in fact even in raw numbers America has more people in jail than China - (which has rather a lot more people). That's decidedly NOT the land of the free anymore, and since all these laws are based on fear -it's not really the home of the brave now is it ? The reason I judge Americans to have less freedom of speech - is because there is more censorship which can NOT be justified because the actions being censored does NOT intrude on the rights of others. Them being (irrationally) afraid of something, does not mean it's harming them. Hell France doesn't even have public indecency laws(most of Europe does not). I was there in July 2005, during one of the biggest heatwaves in the country's history - all along the seine people were sunbathing in the nude. The seine runs smack through the center of Paris. Millions of workers, business owners, children - the entire city in fact - was watching them, and as far as I can tell the only thought anybody had was "mmm wish *I* had the day off to go sunbathe naked by the Seine in this heat too". What do you think would happen if you try sunbathing naked by the fountains in front of the capitol ?
Actually no, that's not what I'm saying. The people who own a corporation have free speech - the corporation shouldn't. It should be a crime if a corporation ever makes any false claims. False advertising should mean CEO in jail for fraud. We're way too lax on fraud by corporations as it is because of the ridiculous notion that THEY have rights.
If a company claims something about their product that cannot be verified by scientific testing, or represents scientific results in a misleading way - that should be a crime. Frankly we should have put every fucking homoepathy company's CEO in jail decades ago - since we can PROVE that their products do not do what they claim the products do - that's flagrant fraud, yet it remains a multibillion dollar industry because we're too scared to 'censor' an entity that doesn't have free speech rights and is saying something that would actually be illegal if an individual said it (even if we tend to be terrible at prosecuting them).
Another example: DNA studies have found that 2 out of every 3 suplements do not contain any trace whatsoever of the plant it's supposed to be derived from. Imagine if 2 out of ever 3 bottles of milk did not contain a single molecule of milk ! Would you consider it 'free speech' to claim whatever the fuck is in those bottles is milk ? Would you be happy if you buy one and find out afterwards ? Would you think we should punish the people who sold you that bottle under false pretenses ? Do you think it's GOOD that we have regulations that say you can't call it "milk" unless it comes out of a cow's tits ? I do. It may be censorship but it's entirely justified and society WITH that censorship is BETTER than society without that one. So why the fuck do we let companies get away with selling you who the fuck knows what and claiming it's horny goat weed ?
I believe in equality before the law. That means- if a company does something that harms somebody, I believe the CEO should face the EXACT SAME punishment that I would have face. Company polutes a river and somebody dies ? CEO should be facing first degree murder charges - just like I would face if I poisoned your glass of water. Lots of people died ? That's a lot of charges - send him down for life (or the chair) like the fucking mass murderer he is.
And no, I don't think there is any reason for corporations to have free speech - they should be legally restricted from saying anything at all without convincing scientific reason to believe it's true. Society would be no less free (more free in fact I think) - and a lot better off. If the CEO wants to give a speech denying climate change - he has the right to be an idiot, if his company puts out a statement to that effect - he should go to jail. Human rights, for individual humans only.
>Also, if Somalia is not my paradise do I have standing to sue you for fraud?
Nope, because this thread is not a contract and I did not attempt to sell you property in Somalia, I merely expressed an opinion. The same opinion WOULD be illegal if it was in a contract - since I certainly don't believe Somalia is a paradise and it would be easy to show that I knew it wasn't when I claimed it. But fraud only applies to contracts, not to opinions in conversation.
Erm no - the illegal act is the dishonest or bad faith contract.
A contract is certainly speech.
You try and sell somebody the Brooklyn bridge - you've committed a crime REGARDLESS of whether he buys it or not.
> The specific words used should not be illegal. Holocaust denial laws also do not make specific words illegal. They make it generically illegal to lie about a specific topic. That is no greater a restriction on free speech than fraud laws. Fraud laws make it illegal to lie in a contract - if you are claiming to own the thing you're selling and you do not, that's a crime. Holocaust denial laws make it illegal to lie about a specific historic event. Frankly that's a significantly smaller restriction than fraud laws since it's only that ONE event you can't lie about and only ONE lie about it is restricted - you're still welcome to claim Adolf Hitler was a reptilian and the holocaust was meant to be the first phase of eradicating all humans or any other bullshit idea you can think up. Fraud laws prohibit ANY deliberate dishonesty in a contract. That's literally the definition of fraud: deliberate dishonesty in a contract whether verbal or written.
*citation needed* Good luck - since every shred of actual data shows that imigrants, especially refugees, are far more likely to be victims than perpetrators of crime, and not only are the NOT nett tax consumers as you claim - the average immigrant produces thousands of times in revenue what he costs in services, they are in fact much BETTER contributors than natives.
But I did - I measured it in the most basic way - how much speech is censored by the government. And in most of the countries where this particular piece of censorship exists, there are fewer censorship laws than in the USA. Most of them don't even HAVE obscenity laws (which are definitely free speech reductions).
I gave you a rather graphic example of speech that is free in Germany, and not in the USA , and there is far more like that than the one and only thing of which the opposite is true.
A group of protesters don't have rights as a group, each member has rights, that they choose to excercise them at the same time is not relevant - any one of them could walk away at any moment.
We don't grant rights to the group - only to the individuals who are at the protest.
So why should the non-existent, immortal entity known as a corporation have rights - all the shareholders already have rights. The corporation is not all of them acting in concert - a small minority of them tend to have most of the votes and the rest either have to give up their investment or accept the decisions of those who have more money than them to invest. A system where money can buy you more votes is not freedom or democracy in any shape. It's flat out plutocratic. There is no room for giving any political power whatsoever to plutocratic entities in a democratic country.
Oh so you think that fraud is okay if the victim doesn't fall for it ?
But it's just one of many examples - if absolute free speech was a thing, then I could hire somebody to kill you and only the hitman could possibly be charged with a crime - me paying him to kill you is just speech, after all. Only he 'committed a crime'.
You'd LOVE to live like that ? Well then, Somalia is your paradise, off you go to pack your bags. Stop trying to fuck things up for the rest of us.
That's another side of the same coin. These are the principles of a free country: - Citizens have the power to replace the government - Citizens have other checks and ballances over the government - The rule of law is sacrosanct - Everybody is equal before the law - Nobody is above the law
And corporations violate every single one of those. Their violation of any of them does not make their violation of the others less severe.
These places have been liberal democracies, with these laws, for over 80 years now... it looks like they are doing okay. Hell Germany has even had a thriving neo-nazi movement throughout. Doing marches in the streets and making fools of themselves shouting Rudolf Hess's name.
There's no such thing as a 'nation' never has been, never will be, never could be. It's fundamentally impossible as a concept. Every country has had multiple cultures since time fucking began. It's multiculturalism or what there was before it - constant, neverending intertribal wars.
I choose the version that will NOT kill 5 billion people in a year.
Words change their meanings over time. Democracy today does not JUST mean the kind of anarchism Plato describes. It's also a collective noun for quite a large number of systems. Many of which can be collectively further grouped as "representative democracies" - a true republic is one of the systems that fit within the definition of "representative democracy", but at least some kinds of constitutional mnnarchies fit there as well (for example the one in Norway).
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All of libertarianism is impossible without a complete dictatorship. Interestingly one of the first people to every realize that and say it out loud was a highly regarded conservative.
History lesson follows:
Back in the 1970's after the democratically elected but left-leaning Salvadore Alende's government was overthrown in a coup by Pinochet, major libertarian economist F.A. Hayek and Milton Friedman basically wrote his economic policy. Pinochet did the whole republican pipe dream. He destroyed the welfare state. He cut taxes on the rich. He locked the currency to the dollar and declared war on inflation. He got rid of practically every regulation (in between he killed tens of thousands of people rather brutally but lets' focus on the economics).
It was called the "Chilean Miracle" - the country's GDP growth rate shot up to amazing levels, it looked set to rapidly become the wealthiest country in South America ! It seemed too good to be true.
And Hayek set off to Britain to use those numbers to sell the idea to Margaret Thatcher. Thatcher went over the list, looked at the amazing results in Chile, and listened to Hayek and then adopted quite a few of Pinochet's policies. Hayek ranted that only adopting SOME of those policies would not achieve the same good results and Thatcher told him: it's impossible to do more than a few. Chile is a dictatorship, Britain is a democracy. You can ONLY do the full libertarian recipe for an economy in a dictatorship - it's impossible in a liberal democracy over a free people.
The tail of the story is that it turned out the Chilean miracle actually WAS to good to be true - it literally never happened. What DID happen is that, in the absence of any significant taxes bankers had nothing to discourage padding their profit margins to drive up share prices, and in the absence of basically any regulation of the finance industry: there was no way to catch them doing it.
Soon every banker was reporting massively greater profits than any of them were actually making. In reality - none were making much more than they had been making under Alende - and the entirety of that massive GDP growth consisted of nothing but flagrant lies on balance sheets - bankers pretending they made much more profit that never existed, driving up their share prices and getting a lot richer.
By 1982 investors started getting fishy, some started investigating... and discovered the fraud- and the Chilean economy collapsed into tatters.
The greatest libertarian economic experiment of all time did not yield a single penny in growth - all it did was to produce perhaps the greatest scale of bankfraud in human history (Seriously - it made the subprime crises look like somebody misplaced the petty cash). Somebody else based his ideology on the Chilean miracle - and never altered it even after the miracle was shown to be nothing but smoke and mirrors, Ronald Reagan.
And, in a very real sense, that's how the world we live in now was born.
>Gee... I wonder why that would be? Could it possibly be because of 'catastrophic man-made global warming' alarmists? Sorry - 'climate change' alarmists?
Nope. Firstly that group of people don't EXIST (the term 'alarmist' is not accurate unless the threat isn't real) and secondly the decline of coal had nothing to do with them anyway. That was driven entirely by the availability of cheap natural gas. Which fucking sucks for people who want something done about climate change since gas is only a tiny bit cleaner than coal. We'd rather have NEITHER - but we didn't kill coal, we wish we did, it got killed by a cheaper fossil fuel.
Well I assume you're driving a major effort to get cats banned ? Because cats kill more birds in a day than wind farms do in 10 years.
Honestly - if the Uranium miners were the ones being retrained it would be an even BIGGER story. Uranium mining is seriously dirty business, it's by far the most environmentally destructive resource to mine - mining coal is bad, but uranium mining is worse. I'm not factoring in climate change here- just the damage from the mining - but saving that damage is a huge boon for the environment.
It's not the story though - because as you yourself say, the uranium mining is still booming, that implies the uranium miners are still employed, but there's probably not enough jobs there to employ everybody who used to work in coal - so another boom industry that creates lots of jobs is a pretty good thing for the county economically, the environment locally and the society at large (on multiple levels: less money needed for welfare in the region saves other taxpayers money, less climate change benefits everybody etc. etc.).
Ultimately both industries have another major advantage over coal as a local keystone industry: a lot less people dying young from blacklung.
>This shows one of the major problems with wind farming, the things are high maintenance.
Yeah ! A windfarm's maintenance is like... almost 5% as much as that of a coal plant !
Trump will never pass a tax that his own activities are liable for. I
Plants, like everything else, evolve for the environment they exist in. Increased CO2 only increases plant yields within a fairly narrow band - the same band that's existed for the past twenty million years or so. Outside that band it harms plants, too little harms them obviously but so does too much - just as living in an excessively high oxygen environment is harmful to animals.
Of course, if the oxygen level changes significantly - animals do evolve to live in the new ranges, but that takes millions of years, pretty much everything that lived beforehand dies off - and new species replace them. The last time there was a huge change was in the carboniferous era - the evolution of wooded plants produced plant matter that nothing at the time could digest, so when those trees died, they didn't rot and return their carbon as carbon-dioxide and take the oxygen they had produced back out of the atmosphere - they just lay there until they got buried by geology.
Those trees became the fossil fuels we use today.
But they had an impact on the environment, not being carbon neutral they pushed the oxygen level way up - it peaked at almost 40% of the atmosphere. Basically every animal that had thrived before the carboniferous went extinct - and evolution produced new animals that could live in that environment. Book lungs became a lot more efficient and we saw giant insects thriving. There was a dragonfly with a 1m wingspan, and it's likely that the biggest arachnids of all time lived then - it was the one time in history it was possible for a spider to survive if it's much bigger than a tarantula because the atmosphere was so oxygen rich. Sadly spiders don't fossilize well or often so we don't know if there WERE giant spiders, but it's likely.
Eventually new bacteria evolved that COULD digest wood, trees began to rot - and gradually the atmosphere returned to an in-balance level of about 21% oxygen. All the giant insects and arachnids promptly went extinct as their lungs simply could not breath at this new lower level.
The same is true for plants, massive changes in the CO2 level only increase yields for a little while - beyond a given point it greatly REDUCES yields.
We're evolved for the world as it is, within a fairly narrow band and with very gradual change. Rapid change like we're doing now is a nightmare. Sure we could probably adapt, it's probably not an extinction level event for us - but it's going to be massively disruptive. Millions, perhaps billions, will die. Most of them killing each other for resources.
Look at the political fallout that just a few million refugees have caused in Europe (where, in a population of over a billion - they are a rounding error). Can you imagine the outcome of BILLIONS of refugees ?
It's easy to say we can 'adapt' - it's insane to think adapting will be cheaper than replacing fossil fuels, and it's REALLY insane to think it will happen without massive loss of life.
Humanity will (probably) survive, but civilization DEFINITELY cannot.
And yet those laws are rarely, if ever, enforced and the bigger a corporation the less likely it is that the law will be enforced.
This creates a stratified society where the law only applies to some - where there is a class that is above the law, and that can, will and does lead to atrocities.
This is why I am opposed to corporations flaunting any laws, even bad ones - not least because there is no universal agreement on what laws as bad. I think most citizens believe that throwing poison in drinking water is a bad thing to do that should be against the law. American coal mines apparently don't agree - and recently their puppets in congress has made it legal for them to do so.
They obviously consider it a bad law - most other citizens don't agree, surely whether it's legal or not should not be determined by how rich the people with the opinion are ? Denying speech to the collective is one way to equalise lobbying power a bit. So that the many who would be harmed are not drowned out by the few who would gain.
The republican's justification for making that legal was "it doesn't happen anyway". They must think we are all fools. If it genuinely didn't happen before it was against the law, and wasn't going to happen now that it's legal again- then the law had no impact. A law that nobody WANTS to break cannot possibly be a bad law, or a good law, it's at best neutral and should one exception arise then you have it to deal with things. If their claim was true - then this was, in fact, the PERFECT law - a law that didn't intrude on anything anybody wanted to do anyway. Nobody lobbies to get rid of a law they don't want to break.
Expect a lot of people to start dying from poisoned water in the near future.
To show that I sincerely and utterly enjoy mixing with people of many cultures.
If people are protesting something you don't agree with, do a counter protest.
I live in a city that's 30% Muslim, has been for centuries, we all get along great. And I would feel quite saddened if our beloved Muslim fellow citizens were removed. Their art and music has shaped the sight and sound of the city. Their architecture has made it beautiful. And on top of that one of the most ethnically mixed cities in the world.
Multiculturarilism is the natural consequence of living and genuinely interacting with, forming human connections with, people of many cultures. That's when you start to realise that your common humanity exceeds your cultural differences - that they are all just like you, just people, just trying to put food on the table.
And, of course, Muslims will have to adapt a little when living in European cities -but you can't expect them to be the ONLY ones adapting - you also need to adapt in order to accomodate. But trust me, your cities will be better if you do.
Multiculturalism doesn't just mean you get adopt the best of their culture - it means sharing the best of yours with them too. Doing only the first half is known as "cultural appropriation" and it's fairly significantly evil thing to do. It's basically genocide on the instalment plan.
I truly don't agree with your assessment. Every right ends where it would intrude on somebody else's rights. So noise nuisance laws are justified as their absence would intrude on other people's rights. Sexuality, in any context, cannot possibly intrude on the rights of anybody. After all - if you don't like it, you could just change the channel.
>Censorship in Germany is trying to suppress ideas
Actually, no, it is not. Though it may look like that to the uninformed. The limited censorship in Germany is - just like noise nuisance laws - protecting the rights of others. Germany recognises that the first phase of the holocaust was denying the humanity of some and removing their human dignity. So - in an effort to never repeat their biggest shame, they wish to prevent it from the very first phase. They recognise human dignity as a constitutional right - and censor speech only where that speech would intrude on this right. Even then, they go to great lengths to keep the limitations as narrow as possible, make exceptions for artistic expression and try to persuade those who hold such ideas rather than jail them. Holocaust denial is an idea that is provably, factually false. That is only expressed by those who wish to pretend Nazism was a great success and which greatly injures the dignity of those who survived that horror and still has to live with the trauma of it. You called it "relatively harmless" - I call it "justified".
The question of justification is a legal one, which is not answered by lawmakers but by the judicial branch in free countries - giving citizens the means to challenge the justifiability of a law. Perhaps, one day, somebody would bring a case to the German high court and argue that all holocaust survivors are now long dead - this idiotic law no longer protects their dignitiy since they aren't there to be harmed, it's no longer justifiable. Perhaps one day the court will agree. This law is not carved in stone.
But America has censorship on moralistic grounds, of things that cannot and does not intrude on anybody else's rights. America is the land of victimless crimes and this has created the largest per capita prison population in the world - and in fact even in raw numbers America has more people in jail than China - (which has rather a lot more people). That's decidedly NOT the land of the free anymore, and since all these laws are based on fear -it's not really the home of the brave now is it ?
The reason I judge Americans to have less freedom of speech - is because there is more censorship which can NOT be justified because the actions being censored does NOT intrude on the rights of others. Them being (irrationally) afraid of something, does not mean it's harming them.
Hell France doesn't even have public indecency laws(most of Europe does not). I was there in July 2005, during one of the biggest heatwaves in the country's history - all along the seine people were sunbathing in the nude. The seine runs smack through the center of Paris. Millions of workers, business owners, children - the entire city in fact - was watching them, and as far as I can tell the only thought anybody had was "mmm wish *I* had the day off to go sunbathe naked by the Seine in this heat too".
What do you think would happen if you try sunbathing naked by the fountains in front of the capitol ?
If he has the right to draw a painting declaring that god hates me ? I have the right to piss on that painting.
Actually no, that's not what I'm saying.
The people who own a corporation have free speech - the corporation shouldn't. It should be a crime if a corporation ever makes any false claims. False advertising should mean CEO in jail for fraud. We're way too lax on fraud by corporations as it is because of the ridiculous notion that THEY have rights.
If a company claims something about their product that cannot be verified by scientific testing, or represents scientific results in a misleading way - that should be a crime. Frankly we should have put every fucking homoepathy company's CEO in jail decades ago - since we can PROVE that their products do not do what they claim the products do - that's flagrant fraud, yet it remains a multibillion dollar industry because we're too scared to 'censor' an entity that doesn't have free speech rights and is saying something that would actually be illegal if an individual said it (even if we tend to be terrible at prosecuting them).
Another example: DNA studies have found that 2 out of every 3 suplements do not contain any trace whatsoever of the plant it's supposed to be derived from. Imagine if 2 out of ever 3 bottles of milk did not contain a single molecule of milk ! Would you consider it 'free speech' to claim whatever the fuck is in those bottles is milk ? Would you be happy if you buy one and find out afterwards ? Would you think we should punish the people who sold you that bottle under false pretenses ? Do you think it's GOOD that we have regulations that say you can't call it "milk" unless it comes out of a cow's tits ? I do. It may be censorship but it's entirely justified and society WITH that censorship is BETTER than society without that one. So why the fuck do we let companies get away with selling you who the fuck knows what and claiming it's horny goat weed ?
I believe in equality before the law. That means- if a company does something that harms somebody, I believe the CEO should face the EXACT SAME punishment that I would have face. Company polutes a river and somebody dies ? CEO should be facing first degree murder charges - just like I would face if I poisoned your glass of water. Lots of people died ? That's a lot of charges - send him down for life (or the chair) like the fucking mass murderer he is.
And no, I don't think there is any reason for corporations to have free speech - they should be legally restricted from saying anything at all without convincing scientific reason to believe it's true. Society would be no less free (more free in fact I think) - and a lot better off. If the CEO wants to give a speech denying climate change - he has the right to be an idiot, if his company puts out a statement to that effect - he should go to jail.
Human rights, for individual humans only.
>Also, if Somalia is not my paradise do I have standing to sue you for fraud?
Nope, because this thread is not a contract and I did not attempt to sell you property in Somalia, I merely expressed an opinion. The same opinion WOULD be illegal if it was in a contract - since I certainly don't believe Somalia is a paradise and it would be easy to show that I knew it wasn't when I claimed it. But fraud only applies to contracts, not to opinions in conversation.
Erm no - the illegal act is the dishonest or bad faith contract.
A contract is certainly speech.
You try and sell somebody the Brooklyn bridge - you've committed a crime REGARDLESS of whether he buys it or not.
> The specific words used should not be illegal.
Holocaust denial laws also do not make specific words illegal. They make it generically illegal to lie about a specific topic. That is no greater a restriction on free speech than fraud laws. Fraud laws make it illegal to lie in a contract - if you are claiming to own the thing you're selling and you do not, that's a crime. Holocaust denial laws make it illegal to lie about a specific historic event.
Frankly that's a significantly smaller restriction than fraud laws since it's only that ONE event you can't lie about and only ONE lie about it is restricted - you're still welcome to claim Adolf Hitler was a reptilian and the holocaust was meant to be the first phase of eradicating all humans or any other bullshit idea you can think up. Fraud laws prohibit ANY deliberate dishonesty in a contract.
That's literally the definition of fraud: deliberate dishonesty in a contract whether verbal or written.
*citation needed*
Good luck - since every shred of actual data shows that imigrants, especially refugees, are far more likely to be victims than perpetrators of crime, and not only are the NOT nett tax consumers as you claim - the average immigrant produces thousands of times in revenue what he costs in services, they are in fact much BETTER contributors than natives.
But I did - I measured it in the most basic way - how much speech is censored by the government. And in most of the countries where this particular piece of censorship exists, there are fewer censorship laws than in the USA. Most of them don't even HAVE obscenity laws (which are definitely free speech reductions).
I gave you a rather graphic example of speech that is free in Germany, and not in the USA , and there is far more like that than the one and only thing of which the opposite is true.
A group of protesters don't have rights as a group, each member has rights, that they choose to excercise them at the same time is not relevant - any one of them could walk away at any moment.
We don't grant rights to the group - only to the individuals who are at the protest.
So why should the non-existent, immortal entity known as a corporation have rights - all the shareholders already have rights. The corporation is not all of them acting in concert - a small minority of them tend to have most of the votes and the rest either have to give up their investment or accept the decisions of those who have more money than them to invest.
A system where money can buy you more votes is not freedom or democracy in any shape. It's flat out plutocratic. There is no room for giving any political power whatsoever to plutocratic entities in a democratic country.
Those are not different things, even if you think they are.
Oh you poor asshole. /s
Your country was enriched with another vibrant community. What an absolute tragedy.
Oh so you think that fraud is okay if the victim doesn't fall for it ?
But it's just one of many examples - if absolute free speech was a thing, then I could hire somebody to kill you and only the hitman could possibly be charged with a crime - me paying him to kill you is just speech, after all. Only he 'committed a crime'.
You'd LOVE to live like that ? Well then, Somalia is your paradise, off you go to pack your bags. Stop trying to fuck things up for the rest of us.
That's another side of the same coin. These are the principles of a free country:
- Citizens have the power to replace the government
- Citizens have other checks and ballances over the government
- The rule of law is sacrosanct
- Everybody is equal before the law
- Nobody is above the law
And corporations violate every single one of those. Their violation of any of them does not make their violation of the others less severe.
These places have been liberal democracies, with these laws, for over 80 years now... it looks like they are doing okay. Hell Germany has even had a thriving neo-nazi movement throughout. Doing marches in the streets and making fools of themselves shouting Rudolf Hess's name.
>What about "hate art?"
What about it ? Most likely scenario is that it will get vandalized. And I'll defend the vandals as exercising THEIR free speech.
There's no such thing as a 'nation' never has been, never will be, never could be. It's fundamentally impossible as a concept. Every country has had multiple cultures since time fucking began. It's multiculturalism or what there was before it - constant, neverending intertribal wars.
I choose the version that will NOT kill 5 billion people in a year.
Words change their meanings over time. Democracy today does not JUST mean the kind of anarchism Plato describes. It's also a collective noun for quite a large number of systems. Many of which can be collectively further grouped as "representative democracies" - a true republic is one of the systems that fit within the definition of "representative democracy", but at least some kinds of constitutional mnnarchies fit there as well (for example the one in Norway).