The accepted solution is to have a constitution that says otherwise.
Which is a bit complicated here, as the EU has no real constitution and this 'law' (really a regulation) is a blatant violation of the constitutions of countries that did choose to establish secrecy of correspondence.
> The accepted solution is to have a constitution that says otherwise
And the willingness and ability to enforce it. The current iteration of ChatControl is pushed by Denmark, which is at present the President of the Council of the European Union. The Danish Constitution itself enshrines the right to privacy of communication [0], but this is not stopping Denmark from wanting to ratify ChatControl anyway.
[0]: https://danskelove.dk/grundloven/72
Yes but unfortunately courts are mostly reactive, not proactive
Sometimes there are some mechanisms to block unconstitutional (or other regulation) laws from passing but they're limited
Not sure how that would apply at the EU level or even at the Danish level
> Yes but unfortunately courts are mostly reactive, not proactive
I think it’s always the case, no? Unless the unconstitutional law is approved, there is nothing to dispute in court.
In the Netherlands we have the “Eerste kamer” (first chamber, also called Senate) that is responsible for verifying that the proposed laws are in accordance with our “constitution”. They are elected of band with the normal government which should ensure that no single party is able to steamroll laws through both chambers.
In theory the "Bundespräsident" in Germany is supposed to only ratify laws that are in accordance with the constitution, but I don't think it happens that he refuses to do this.
Correct. Imagine the number of challenges in court based on mere rumor of a law.
> but this is not stopping Denmark from wanting to ratify ChatControl anyway.
What the TLDR of the motivation behind this? Is it just politicians playing to their base (think of the children) or corporate lobbying. or religion, etc?
Seems to me that the negatives of passing something like this are super obvious and dystopian.
I suspect it's a mix of many Danish politicians' own authoritarian tendencies/ambitions and corporate lobbying, though I have no proof of the latter when it comes to ChatControl specifically.
Generally speaking, there is a lot of dark money in Danish politics, and the EU has repeatedly flagged Denmark as a country lacking in transparency with regards to corporate lobbying: https://www.altinget.dk/artikel/eu-kritik-af-danmark-puster-...
Generally speaking, the Danish government also tends to behave in authoritarian ways. E.g., Denmark has wilfully violated EU regulations on data retention for many, many years. In 2021, a Danish court ruled that the Danish Ministry of Justice could continue its mass surveillance practices even though they were (and still are) illegal under EU law: https://www.information.dk/indland/2021/06/justitsministerie...
Currently Denmark is also trying to leverage its position as the President of the Council of the EU to legalise, on a EU-wide level, the form of data retention that Denmark has been illegally practising: https://ec.europa.eu/info/law/better-regulation/have-your-sa...
Interesting. I am not expert on politics of Denmark, so my question is: is this push universal across political parties or it’s a feature of a specific political block that rules for the past X years and consistently worked in this direction?
There was another thread on specifically our minister of justice, with comments that touch on the historical aspect: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45248802
Generalized, this looks to me like a question about why humans sometimes get hell-bent about some idea and become blind to the side effects and ignorant when it comes to risk management.
Sometimes it could be malice or personal gains. Sometimes, I think, it could be just a strong bias towards some idea that causes a mental blindness. Such blindness can happen to anyone, at any level of power (or lack thereof), politicians are not unique in this - the only difference is the scope of impact due to the power they have. And we aren't particularly filtering them against such behavior - on the contrary, I feel that many people want politicians to have an agenda and even cheer when they put their agenda above the actual reality, any consequences be damned.
If I was leading another western nation I would be looking at the right wing takeover of the US government in terror.
For sure. Does anyone want Trump to know everything you write? Erdogan if Turkey ever does enter the EU?
EU has the Charter of Fundamental rights which is a part of the Treaty of Lisbon which is the constitutional basis of EU: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charter_of_Fundamental_Right...
In the charter, the protection of personal data and privacy is a recognized right. So chat control is also probably against the EU law.
Both the right to privacy and the right to protection of personal data appear to have pretty big exemptions for government.
The right to private communications was modified by the ECHR to give an exemption for prevention of crime/protection of morals/etc.[1] and the right to protection of personal data exempts any legitimate basis laid down by law[2].
I imagine they'd be able to figure out some form of Chat Control that passed legal muster. Perhaps a reduced version of Chat Control, say, demanding secret key escrow, but only demanding data access/scans of those suspected of a crime rather than everyone.
Legal rulings also seem to indicate that general scanning could be permitted if there was a serious threat to national security, so once a system to allow breaking encryption and scanning is in place, then it could be extended to what they want with the right excuse.
[1] https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/7-respect-privat...
[2] https://fra.europa.eu/en/eu-charter/article/8-protection-per...
> I imagine they'd be able to figure out some form of Chat Control that passed legal muster. Perhaps a reduced version of Chat Control, say, demanding secret key escrow, but only demanding data access/scans of those suspected of a crime rather than everyone.
Isn't that pretty much excatly how it is done in Russia, which was ruled by ECHR to be illegal[0]?
https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/fre#{%22itemid%22:[%22001-230854%...
I'm not familiar with EU law, but reading Title II article 7 and 8 makes me feel this could be an optimistic interpretation of what the Treaty of Lisbon guarantees. I'm sure the supporters of chat control would love to argue something like "ChatControl respects the private communications of an individual by protecting how the data is processed to ensure only the legitimate basis of processing the data is incurred by the law" in court.
I would hope the EU courts would disagree, but I'm not sure if anyone can say until it's tested directly.
Even the EU council's legal service thinks the law as-proposed is probably incompatible with Article 7 and 8:
> The CLS concludes that, in the light of the case law of the Court of Justice at this stage, the regime of the detection order, as currently provided for by the proposed Regulation with regard to interpersonal communications, constitutes a particularly serious limitation to the rights to privacy and personal data protection enshrined in Article 7 and 8 of the Charter.
https://data.consilium.europa.eu/doc/document/ST-8787-2023-I...
I think there are variants of the ChatControl proposal which were clearly problematic, but the different variations of the proposal try to toe the line since. This report talks to the 2022 era proposal.
As shown on the other side of Atlantic that is worthless when no one upholds the constitution.
I think of constitution as a contract between the citizens and the state and the (judiciary?)
Like, constitution both defines the rights of citizens and the limits of those rights and the same goes for the states.
I feel as if the creators of constitutions think that it is a set of checks and balances...
Just as if how a citizen violates something written in the constitution, the state can punish it.
In the same manner, I believe that the constitution thought that if the state violates some constitutional right of citizen, then citizens can point that out and (punish?) the state as the legitimacy of state is through that constitution which they might be breaking...
I concur (fancy word for believe which I wanted to share lol) you are talking about america. The thing is, revolutions are often messy and so much things are happening in america that I think that people are just overwhelmed and have even forgotten all the stuff happening in the past... Like tarrifs were huge thing, then epstein news then this I think autism thing by trump.
Like, the amount of political discourse is happening less and idk, oh shit, just remembered the uh person deporting thing which was illegal which was done anyway
If these things happened in isolation, they would all have huge actions against govt. but they are happening back to back and so everyone's just kinda silent I think, frankly I believe overwhelmed.
I believe that just as in nepal, in america everyone is whining on social media but nobody's taking action. Nepal blocked social media and so people in nepal were kinda forced to take action irl and it worked kinda nice in the end tbh
So maybe its social media which is enabling this thing.... which is funny to me as I am doing the same thing right now lol
All for sweet internet points tho.
A large portion of the population either does not believe or does not mind the violations of our constitution to achieve their desired outcomes. As an American, it came as a surprise to me that we do not, in fact, have broadly shared values about our system of governance. This year has been a devastating blow to my confidence in our democracy and the ability of people to govern themselves generally.
> This year has been a devastating blow to my confidence in our democracy and the ability of people to govern themselves generally.
The latter has been on my mind for quite some time.
The logical conclusion of "people can't govern themselves generally" kind of gestures at religion as a solution - after all, if man cannot govern themselves, why not rely on a higher power to manage them?
Of course, the problem with that point of view is that from the atheistic perspective, there is no higher power, and from the agnostic perspective, whatever higher power there is is inscrutable and beyond our ken.
This then leads me to the conclusion that religion is ultimately a creation of men, and are thus prone to the same power-corrupting vices as any other institution created by men.
Except that leaves no real solution the problem of the governance of people. And it's a quandary I see no realistic chance of escape from.
I agree to the same thing to a somewhat degree from another standpoint / a discussion worth tapping into.
Its not that the logical conclusion is "people can't govern themselves generally"
Its that, we have created a system which incentivizes corruption or basically evil things for the most part from TOP TO BOTTOM partially influenced by biological factors beyond our control.
Sure, one answer to the "people can't govern themselves generally" is to decentralize the power.
I live in India and I loathed my political system thinking that it wasn't good and I really appreciated american political system but the more I think about it, fundamentally Indian political system is one of the best actually.
It has 3 levels of decentralization with Strong Right to information and uh multi party system with Even Universal basic income which I came to know from an american which is a real shocker I know.
Yet I still see people begging and there being some chaos, My logical answer to it is corruption from TOP TO BOTTOM which I observed atleast.
I sort of believe that the same thing happens everywhere to be honest if that can make sense...
Like, there is corruption and human evils which is what people select in real life anonymous things as compared to true morality that one can reason through. Simply for one's own profit.
It also might be one of those debates that India might have a good political system but simply the people don't have enough money or something and they want more or everyone does it which is a common answer that I actually hear.
I believe that the reason why people can't govern themselves generally is that there is a biological answer to it in the sense that for people to govern themselves, we would prefer /need an altruist society and in an altruist society, and how the genes which favour a bit of evil in altruist society might reproduce more and spread sort of thus creating an equilibra of sorts and combining with that the idea on how interlinked/interinfluential each of us is to one other through language.
It was a catharsis to me, The answer might be depressing. But its fundamentally logic. Life just sort of happened and then it got way too focused on spreading itself / the one which did survived and boom that's biology which then gets to this political thing...
Like it was sort of meant to happen y'know? atleast that's my current understanding of it. Would love to discuss tho.
> As an American, it came as a surprise to me that we do not, in fact, have broadly shared values about our system of governance.
It shouldn't, America is two very distinct nations. The shape and nature of those nations vary wildly in classical Baudrilliardian sidewinding progression, but it's rooted in the very early history of British North America. Two distinct primogenitor colonies and societies, Jamestown and Plymouth. Founded for different reasons, in different contexts, by different people. Understanding the disparity is key to understanding a great deal about America. This divide has always persisted. Jefferson was of Tidewater, Hamilton was of Yankeedom. Democrats vs Whigs. Dixie vs Yankeedom. This split persists in history, and is much the reason why America is ostensibly a two party system. Even if the regional divide is not as hard and fast as it once was, even if the matters in which they differ change radically over time, the divide itself will always persist. It's wrapped up in the pre-revolutionary context the country was founded on. America will always be two countries in a trenchcoat, two echoes of wildly different cultures set against each other for dominance. You should always be keen to remember that. The union isn't of 13 distinct colonies, but two distinct cultures always in tension. It's a fundamental structure within our larger cultural blueprint.
That's a great insight and one for which I thank you for pointing out as I learned something new thanks to you today.
My question is whether two different cultures can in fact coexist with each other for a single system of governance.
Like, Why do we focus so much on our differences as a species that we forget how much common we are on literally everything.
What is a solution to this problem that's kinda impacting the world right now. America moves in pendulum in a political cycle completely 180'ing but yet at the same time, I feel like no real change is being made against lobbying/corruption which sort of infiltrates the world too.
Bernie sanders and now maybe zohran are the two democrats who are genuinely tryna do something for america which I deeply respect tbh. Yet there wasn't really a way for one to vote for them directly y'know?
Are these differences of cultures really that distinct to basically split a country in half in everything except the borders?
Was there no way of integrating them without having them idk being the way that they are right now?
I'm kinda struggling to understand how this relates to our makeup today. I can't find the thread.
What cultural group today is Jamestown and which is Plymouth?
I think a good introductory text on the deep nature of the divide in America is We Have the War Upon Us by William J. Cooper.
It's mostly a book about the civil war, but it introduces some post-revolution pre-war history and names. That gives you more resources to dig up. You should read as much as you can and form your own opinions on that.
I'm relatively well versed in "the divide" so to speak. But I'm trying to understand what you mean by the Plymouth and Jamestown split as it relates to our modern country today.
It seems like both the spirit of Plymouth and Jamestown are inside the big tent of the Republican party today. But that doesn't sound like what you intended it to mean. Or maybe it is?
That's the part I'm curious about; who is Plymouth and who is Jamestown in 2025 in your eyes?
Plymouth is harder to identify. It's not just the Puritans at Plymouth, nor exclusively New England. It's merely everything that came with the second colonization. The Dutch are a foundational part of Yankeedom. In fact, New York should probably be considered more foundational than Plymouth. You would be right to identify Jamestown with the modern GOP. Traditionally it was represented by the Democratic party, but I assume you're familiar with that.
I should note these geists extend far beyond legitimate political guise.
Of course I understood there were vast cultural and political differences causing tension. I just also believed that we had a shared system of fundamental values enshrined in the constitution and when push came to shove, we would all rally behind it. That's what I thought American patriotism meant; I genuinely thought I could count on Red voters to rabidly defend the constitution.
> I just also believed that we had a shared system of fundamental values enshrined in the constitution and when push came to shove, we would all rally behind it.
The US had a Civil War in the 19th century over the fear of the southern states that the northern states would not only refuse to continue to be complicit in the institution of slavery, but eventually end it.
The seceding states wrote slavery, as well as protections of the property rights of slave-owners, into their constitution.
After the war came the scaling back of Lincoln's planned reconstruction, sharecropping and Jim Crow. There are people alive today who remember segregation.
White supremacy is as American as apple pie.
The thing I find most interesting about your reply is how it demonstrates that we live in wildly subjective realities.
Specifically, how? GP's claims can be factually substantiated. Pick whichever you claim can't.
He isn't calling the claim subjective, but underlining what the claim posits entails that we live in subjective realities.
My read on the US is that it could be 10 or more, functional independant states, or a single massive mess, and US citizens wake up every day and commit themselves to the mess.
Right wingers will look you straight in the eye and tell you that they support suppression of gun rights and speech when it hurts their enemies. Their enemies often live many states away. I have seen the entire country flip on an issue just because the context changes.
The bloodless resolution would be to just agree to not hang out anymore. But I think citizens of a once empire would feel somehow aggrieved to lose that empire. So you guys are going to have to figure this out after spilling a bunch of blood.
The constitution provides no mechanism for dissolution or secession.
Well thats it then. If it isnt written in the documentation, it cant be done.
> I concur (fancy word for believe which I wanted to share lol) you are talking about america.
Just a heads up but concur means "agree", not "believe"
It was a grave tragedy and a miscalculation from my side.
An error that should be discussed for generations :sob: /jk
IN all fairness though, I don't know why I wrote concur, I just thought of it and thought it meant believe...
What would be a fancier word of believe if I may ask ya that you would suggest me to use..
Also I am sorry that I made a mistake tbh, I hope ya get it and thanks for correcting me!
I assent to that statement
Made me have a good ol chuckle / laugh.
Kinda liked it, so thanks lol
You are most definitely not right. The EU charter of fundamental rights is an agreement that holds legal binding. The institutions who are supposed to uphold the charter are CJEU, European Commission, FRA, NHRIs.
The people who wrote this proposal said it themselves - "Whilst different in nature and generally speaking less intrusive, the newly created power to issue removal orders in respect of known child sexual abuse material certainly also affects fundamental rights, most notably those of the users concerned relating to freedom of expression and information."
This proposal is illegal. The fact that CJEU at least haven't issued a statement that this is illegal tells you everything you need to know about the EU and its democracy.
> The accepted solution is to have a constitution that says otherwise.
Constitutions don't enforce themselves. The US constitution has a crystal clear right to bear arms but multiple jurisdictions ignore it and multiple supreme court rulings and make firearm ownership functionally impossible anyway. Free speech regulations have, thankfully, been more robust.
The only thing that stops bad things happening is a critical mass of people who believe in the values the constitution memorializes and who have enough veto power to stop attempts to erode these values.
The US has such a critical mass, the gun debate notwithstanding. Does the EU have enough people who still believe in freedom?
> The US constitution has a crystal clear right to bear arms
It looks like it was drafted by an ESL speaker. It's by far the worst-drafted amendment, grammatically speaking:
> A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.
It's not even a valid English sentence, and it certainly never bothers to define "Arms." Not to mention that, as written, it appears to make it illegal for me to tell you that you cannot come to my house with a gun, because that's me infringing your right. It doesn't constrain Congress. It constrained anyone who wants to take away your right to bear arms.
Sheer lunacy as written. Ungrammatical and implies some insane shit.
But no, you're right, it's crystal clear. Much like how the First Amendment says
> Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press
which in crystal clear terms makes it legal to mass-distribute child pornography. To prohibit it would restrict the freedom of the press.
It also implies that the militia is regulated.
Remove the first and last comma and the sentence works splendidly
No, it doesn't. I said it's grammatically incorrect, not orthographically incorrect. (It's arguably correct orthographically based on the incorrect grammar.)
> [Noun], being [clause], [grammatically correct sentence]
is objectively incorrect English grammar.
Eliding the "being" appositive, you're left with
> [Noun], [sentence].
Unless you're talking to the noun (as in "Hey, you, the well regulated militia! Did you know that the right to keep and bear arms . . . "), it's not grammatically correct.
Ok, get a 2/3 majority of the House and Senate to approve a proposed edit removing those commas, and then get 3/4 of the state legislatures to approve it.
Until then, the commas are officially part of the text.
Comma rules change over time.
But the text of the Constitution only changes through amendments.
That said, the effective meaning of the Constitution is "whatever a majority of the Supreme Court agrees it is."
And to a degree, given the power to impeach Supreme Court justices, "whatever a majority of the Supreme Court agrees it is, and with Congress sufficiently on board to not impeach sufficient justices to force a shift in the balance of the Court."
I'm responding to:
>>> Remove the first and last comma and the sentence works splendidly
>> Until then, the commas are officially part of the text.
> Comma rules change over time.
Maybe the equivalence of the sentence at drafting, today is without commas?
That depends on the opinions of 9 very specific individuals. How the text and its commas might be interpreted by you or I today is irrelevant.
But you chose to tell us about your interpretation. :-)
I had less the current legal interpretation and more the meaning at the time of writing down, as it would reveal itself in current text, in mind, which is relevant to this argument.
I see the conversation differently.
KPGv2 pointed out the phrasing of the 2nd amendment is not clear.
GLdRH said "Remove the first and last comma and the sentence works splendidly".
I said that modifying the literal text requires going through the amendment process.
You said "Comma rules change over time."
I reiterated that the literal text does not change except through the amendment process, and also noted that fundamentally the literal words don't matter much as it's up to a majority of the Supreme Court how to interpret any of it.
You then brought up modern language usages of commas.
I replied that how you or I today interpret the text is irrelevant because only the Supreme Court's opinion matters.
At no point in this conversation have I expressed a specific interpretation of the text, so your indication that I chose to tell the discussion about my interpretation seems weird and maybe you're misreading usernames somewhere along the way.
> maybe you're misreading usernames
Sorry for that.
> KPGv2 pointed out the phrasing of the 2nd amendment is not clear.
I thought me and GLdRH replied to KPGv2 stating that the 2nd amendment isn't valid grammar and this results in some of the unclarity.
When you have this:
, then when you want to discuss meaning issues due to grammar rules, you need to use 18th century grammar. I perceived GLdRH to use 21th century grammar to encode the same sentence. The literal text does not need to be modified, since it uses 18th century grammar rules. Only when you want to parse it with 21th century grammar rules, you need to preprocess it to adjust the grammar first. This preprocessing doesn't need to be written back, since the grammar rules of the text haven't changed. We are only circumventing the parser not supporting the texts grammar.> only the Supreme Court's opinion matters.
This is purely about syntactic issues, not about semantics. The Supreme Court applies also semantics, such as the other legal system definitions of the time. I wasn't replying to that aspect.
I'm not here to argue about the right to bear arms in the USA, but the 2nd amendment is anything but crystal clear in its language.
Seems pretty clear to me, although I'm neither an american nor a lawyer.
i think making your argument on free speech grounds would be stronger
How so? My point is that US constitutional protections on firearm ownership have undeniably eroded. The presence of text on the page did not prevent this erosion. I'm using gun rights as an example of a situation in which text granting a right becomes irrelevant if people stop believing in the values behind the text.
People do believe in freedom of speech in the US, thankfully, even if they've stopped defending gun rights in some places.
EU free speech protections are in the same position gun rights are in the US, and for surprisingly similar reasons.
This simply isn't true. If anything, constitutional protections have dramatically expanded since the amendment was passed.
This is because until the 14th Amendment and the incorporation doctrine, the Bill of Rights only restricted the Federal government, not the States. Prior to the that, state and local governments could (and did) restrict not just firearms, but other rights as well.
Hell, the Bill of Rights still hasn't been fully incorporated, so for instance, despite the 7th Amendment stating otherwise, you don't have the right to a jury trial in civil cases in every state nor the right to indictment by grand jury (5th Amendment).
Of course, some states copied parts of the constitution into their own and had some form of protection, but it was by no means universal. Massachusetts even had a state church until 1833.
when you are talking to a european audience, they tend to be in favor of gun control so they don't care about erosion of those rights (like the people in the US who also favor eroding them, wording of the rules be damned)
HN is to a large extent a popularity contest, and people here are more in favor of free speech than guns. the US record on protecting free speech is very good.
> you are talking to a european audience, they tend to be in favor of gun control so they don't care about erosion of those rights
You have accidentally properly identified the european problem and precisely the reason that chat control will pass: shortsightedness. If people only rise up to protect rights "they need", soon no rights will be left.
In the EU you can have guns, you just must pass some tests, that you know how to use them and you need to store them in separate ways.
But guns are vastly insufficient in this century to overthrow the state, you basically only harm your fellow citizens with them.
Most of the erosion is done through court challenges.
Historically, courts have maintained that legislation is pursued under "good faith". This was the justification for not overturning ACA on the grounds of it being an unconstitutional tax: the lawmakers didn't mean to make it an unapportioned tax, even though it effectively is, so it's okay yall. Washington St just did this with income taxes on capital gains in direct violation of their state constitution a year or two ago.
Where I live, you cannot open carry. That is a direct violation of 2A, but the courts have said it's okay baby because it's not an undue burden to pay a fee and waste a day of your life. Pure nonsense. Just change the constitution for goodness sake.
Plenty of EU states already have a constitution in which this proposal would be de facto unconstitutional.
The issue is what is the European Commission willing to do in order to guarantee that fat contract check goes to Palantir or Thorn or whoever has the best quid pro quo of the day.
This is not Stasi this is Tech billionaires playing kings and buying the EC and Europol for pennies on the dollar and with it the privacy of virtually every citizen of zero interest for law enforcement or agencies.
For practical purposes the EU does have a constitution, it's just a messy collection of treaties rather than a single codified constitution (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_establishing_a_Constitu... for why).
isn't constitution easily changed by parlament?
Usually not "easily". I know Germany requires 2/3 majority.
fwiw, amending the US constitution generally requires a 2/3 majority in both houses of congress to propose the amendment, and then further ratification by 3/4 of the states make the amendment law. it's a fairly long process, and amendments sometime get bogged down and die in the 2nd phase.
(there is another process which calls for a convention, but such a convention would have broad powers to change many things and so far the "two sides" (US rules tilt toward two parties rather than more) have been too scared of what might happen to do that)
Ireland's Supreme Court decided in 1987 to make a referendum mandatory before they would ratify EU treaty amendments. Not that it mattered, because they got a "no" vote but their puppet masters wanted a "yes", so they just reran the referendum the following year...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-eighth_Amendment_of_t...
Only 59% turn out, and the vote won 67%. So in reality less than 40% of the population were for it.
I have vague memories of people saying that the treaty was indecipherable. The EU were like, "Here, vote yes for this big bag of 'misc', or else"
This wasn't the first time they reran a referendum for an EU treaty. They did it back in 2003!
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-sixth_Amendment_of_th...
If the UK wanted to avoid BREXIT all they had to do was look a few miles to the west for the knack.
I've commented this elsewhere, but rights in the US are generally much more absolute than here in Europe.
For example, in the EU you technically have the right to freedom of expression, but you can also be arrested if you say something that could offend someone.
Similarly rights to privacy are often ignored whenever a justification can be made that it's appropriate to do so.
I don't know about elsewhere in the world, but here in the UK you don't even have a right to remain silent because the government added a loophole so that if you're arrested in a UK airport they can arbitrarily force you to answer their questions and provide passwords for any private devices. For this reason you often here reports of people being randomly arrested in UK airports, and the government does this deliberately so they can violate your rights.
> For example, in the EU you technically have the right to freedom of expression, but you can also be arrested if you say something that could offend someone.
So you actually don't have freedom of expression?
No offendings are not an expression. What do you express with them, poor anger management?
Your right to something ends were a right of someone else is violated. That's the case here.
> Your right to something ends were a right of someone else is violated. That's the case here.
Ah yes, that memorable trifecta: Life, Liberty, and the Right to Never Hear Mean Words.
Oral violence also has consequences. From invoking or reinforcing mental diseases over fear and isolation to blackmail and being socially judged on while being innocent. Do you accept random beatings when people feel like it on the street?
Oral violence is an oxymoron. It's dangerous to conflate words and violence because then words quickly become a justification for violence.
Why? How do you define violence? Harming people? Insults and false accusations can have much greater harm to a life then a broken leg.
> violence because then words quickly become a justification for violence
When you don't have a way to fight back and make something stop, without resorting to physical aggression, then your only way is to punch back. When the legal system allows you to fight back, then you can walk away, knowing you can call your lawyer or the police.
Insults cannot have greater harm than just about any physical injury. False accusations already have a legal recourse, as they're defamation.
Have you had a broken leg? When you're young it's an alright thing to deal with, when you're older it can be life altering (it might hurt forever or alter your gait). However most spontaneous violence doesn't result in broken legs but rather hits to the head which can very quickly end up at CTEs or other brain trauma.
In an equal society, you really don't want actual violence to be on the same spectrum as speech of any kind. One problem is that ~50% of the population has a massive natural advantage in the realm of actual violence. Would a husband beating his wife because of "violent words" she inflicted on him be ok under the "speech is violence" rubric?
Freedom of speech is not absolute in the USA.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_free_speech_exce...
"... expression, but you can also be arrested if you say something that could offend someone. ..."
You probably mean hate speech.
We have laws like that too in Canada. It is a good thing.
It all depends who’s defining “hate”. The people you like who are in charge today won’t be there in 20 years, and if any kind of extremism leaks in to society, you could find yourself unable to advocate for your beliefs without getting arrested.
I mean Canada's a pretty depressing example of how bad those laws can be abused.
How on earth are hate speech laws a good thing? Or did I miss a /s?
For example, the US government is trying to label any posthumous criticism of Charlie Kirk "Hate Speech". You can see how dangerous this could be when the hate-mongers get to decide what is considered hate speech.
Honestly, the current administration baffles me. There is so much activity that flies squarely against the constitution in a not at all subtle or clever way; just blatant, "I don't care."
It's one thing to be disruptive and enforce immigration law "by the books" but entirely separate to then go out of your way to not enforce it legally while at the same time violating or attempting to violate the constitution on pretty fundamental levels.