Autumn and Davis, All right. If there is any relevant difference between what you and all the anti-hate speech and anti-MDM crowd propose and what Putin’s tyranny just passed, explain.
I’ll use Canadian law as an example as it’s what I am most familiar with. First, the law represents a limitation on freedom of expression, which is constitutionally protected. In order for any limitation to be placed on freedom of expression, constitutional analysis is required. That analysis is specific to the limitation at hand and isn’t going to be automatically transferrable to any other proposed limitation.
When it comes to Canadian hate speech legislation, when tested in court, it had to pass the Oakes test which looks at the validity of the measures employed in terms of honouring the constitution in its entirety, and the proportionality of the measures enacted keeping legislation to the minimally necessary imposition to achieve the desired effect.
Through such analysis, jurisprudence develops and it is particular to the legislation at hand, or in some cases even particular to the circumstances of the case at hand.
Hate speech legislation at the federal level deals with primarily two things: i) promoting genocide, and ii) vilification/ calumny against an identifiable group. Right off the bat, i) doesn’t apply to the Russian law as reporting on a war is not promotion of genocide. ii) Doesn’t apply because the government is not, for the purposes of law, an ‘identifiable group’.
The fact that the government is not an identifiable group is important because the afore-mentioned constitutional analysis looks at the effect of vilification weighed against constitutional protections for identifiable groups. Again, that’s analysis that won’t transfer over.
Right now I am speaking in brief, so there is a lot I’m leaving out, but the underlying point is that the law is not quite so specious nor equivocal, and when you provide such lazy, irrational fear-mongering on the subject, you do us all a disservice.
Nota Bene: Whether it is a traffic citation on up to murder, if you resist paying the fine or being arrested, tried, and imprisoned, the ultimate penalty for any law is de facto death.
Literally, not true. Perhaps it would be closer to the truth to say the de facto penalty is ultimately death. But lethal force isn’t justified as a penalty except in capital offences and only after a trial. Police are authorized to use lethal force in response to threats, but they are not authorized to carry out summary executions. In practice, an unwillingness to prosecute police for homicide when they abuse their authority leads to corruption. But that isn’t a feature of the system; it’s a flaw of humanity and perhaps evidence for why our policing systems are fundamentally ill-advised.
Unseen 10 months, 4 weeks ago.
TheEncogitationer. Reason: Spelling
