[StandardFuture]

> used to enforce current political orthodoxy.

Which is a nice way of saying that this is the beginnings of a new authoritarian and totalitarian age.

It should be very worrying to everyone to see speech be legally punished in the West.

Slippery slopes do exist and this is one.

[int_19h]

https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwel...

"Unpopular ideas can be silenced, and inconvenient facts kept dark, without the need for any official ban. Anyone who has lived long in a foreign country will know of instances of sensational items of news—things which on their own merits would get the big headlines—being kept right out of the British press, not because the Government intervened but because of a general tacit agreement that ‘it wouldn’t do’ to mention that particular fact. So far as the daily newspapers go, this is easy to understand. The British press is extremely centralised, and most of it is owned by wealthy men who have every motive to be dishonest on certain important topics. But the same kind of veiled censorship also operates in books and periodicals, as well as in plays, films and radio. At any given moment there is an orthodoxy, a body of ideas which it is assumed that all right-thinking people will accept without question. It is not exactly forbidden to say this, that or the other, but it is ‘not done’ to say it, just as in mid-Victorian times it was ‘not done’ to mention trousers in the presence of a lady. Anyone who challenges the prevailing orthodoxy finds himself silenced with surprising effectiveness. A genuinely unfashionable opinion is almost never given a fair hearing, either in the popular press or in the highbrow periodicals."

This was written in 1944, intended as the preface of the "Animal Farm". It was not published until 1972.

[medium_burrito]

For another pillar of this scary new age, look at the absolute willingness of big tech to censor anything that goes against the message of those in power.

[Barrin92]

this is probably a good point to quote the article

"The proposed law would likely run afoul of the First Amendment in the U.S., but despite popular misconceptions Canada is actually its own country."

Contrary to popular (American) opinion laws regulating speech are in fact not a new and authoritarian invention but have existed in the so called 'West' for literally centuries.

To have a rational discussion about this when it comes to countries that don't happen to be the US, like in this case, it would probably be good to not act as if these laws were somehow conjured up out of nothing. The United Kingdom, probably having a claim to be one of the world's longest lasting liberal democracies, has laws concerning speech that in many cases go well beyond laws on continental Europe, so any discussion about speech in the Western (and even specifically Anglo) tradition probably should be had on that ground, rather than just vague pointing about slippery slopes.

[ergot_vacation]

It's almost as if America was a radical attempt at a new kind of government, where its founders tried to avoid many of the pitfalls they had observed in Europe. The "United Kingdom" ("England" when we broke up with it) had (and still has) a method of governance that was flawed. That's why we didn't copy it. Any country that still has an intact monarchy, however ornamental, has no business lecturing others on the ideal forms of government.

[perl4ever]

>Contrary to popular (American) opinion laws regulating speech are in fact not a new and authoritarian invention but have existed in the so called 'West' for literally centuries

It's common sense that without a history in the West of regulating free speech, there wouldn't have been a first amendment in the US. You don't have to know what the regulations were.

So you are not just generalizing Americans as ignorant of history, but also as unable to use basic logic.

[Causality1]

Yes, and the UK arrested a man for teaching a dog the Nazi salute. A dog. In fact they arrest over 2400 people a year for saying mean things on the internet. I find that deeply chilling.