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fao_last Thursday at 4:15 PM1 replyview on HN

The problem here is that contextually you are falling into the trap of "talking about committing a terrorist act" as being relevant to "having private communications", and in the process you are conflating the two. This means you are falling into the trap that the UK government intentionally creates to suppress privacy — within a reader's head, now the two are related. This also means you haven't had to develop any arguments other than "muh free speech!" with respect to why having private communication is important.

The second problem is that American conservatives have framed Nazi speech as a free speech issue, so to an onlooker who is not in the USA, when people talk about "free speech", it comes across as someone defending someone's right to say incredibly harmful, violent things about Jewish people, Transgender people, and so on. I think for most people outside of the USA (and, to be honest, most minority populations within the USA) you should consider "free speech" as being an incredibly tainted phrase for that purpose.

The flipside of all of this is that fascism is very, very possible even with freedom of speech (actually it seems to rely on it, given how virulent the spread of outright Nazi rhetoric has been in the USA so far). Freedom of speech is not the sole thing that holds up a democracy and it weakens your arguments for you to rely upon it like this.


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jandrewrogerslast Thursday at 5:36 PM

> American conservatives have framed Nazi speech as a free speech issue

The famous US Supreme Court case[0] that explicitly confirmed that "Nazi speech is free speech" was brought to the court by the ACLU[1], a left-leaning organization that defends things like LGBTQ rights. Your take is completely divorced from factual reality.

American conservatives aren't "framing" it. They are restating what the US Supreme Court has already determined in a case brought to the court by the liberal left. This is a principled defense of free speech that has historically been supported by people across the political spectrum.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Socialist_Party_of_Am...

[1] https://www.aclu.org

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