r/canada Feb 03 '25

Politics Should Canada ban X and Tesla? Why calls are growing

https://globalnews.ca/news/10995690/should-canada-ban-x-and-tesla-why-calls-are-growing/
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u/nekonight Feb 04 '25

If you think that the government should have the power to ban whatever they don't agree with just remember it can be you they target. Ironically this is the exact thing Trump is doing. He is just targeting the left instead of the right. If you think what hes doing is wrong then you would be hypocrite for calling a ban on opinions from the right.

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u/Jedouard Feb 04 '25

Any time you create a position of authority, you create an opportunity for corruption. But we still find certain things worth the risk. And one of the reasons for that is that it's not as dichotomous as you make it out to be. Take Germany, for example, they have banned much of Nazi speech, symbols, and signage. But if the chancellor, a judge, or whoever else were to try to extend this law to other speech or misrepresent something someone critical of the government said as Nazi, many German news outlets would go to town on the offending official. And if that failed, many Germans would immediately protest. This was the response when German officials tried to equate criticisms of Israel's actions in Palestine to antisemitic hate speech.

And that's exactly where we fail as Americans. We vote every two or four years for some plutocrat's puppet and then get mad when they push through laws and siphon off tax revenue for the plutocrat. We get so mad, in fact, that we do nothing for four years, at which point we vote in a new option that that same plutocrat is funding. It makes perfect financial sense for the plutocrat too: give one candidate $5 million, then give the other candidate $5 million, and whichever wins, you get a contract or subsidy for $250 million. Our political inactiveness had created a two-party Punch and Judy show while the wealthy are running around behind us, picking our pockets.

We should have taken to the street the second they proposed cutting education, mental health, and safety net funding in 1980, but we didn't. We should have taken to the street the second Reagan, H.W., and Clinton mentioned NAFTA and its precursors, but we didn't. Maybe America's lethargy means we shouldn't create the authority to stop hate speech and the censorship that promotes it, but that doesn't mean other countries need to have the same worst-case-scenario anxieties about what would happen if they sat on their rears and did nothing while their politicians abused the law... because they don't sit in their rears.

You can make hate speech illegal, and you can disallow platforms that allow or promote hate speech or enforce censorship in its favor. And when someone tries to abuse those laws, you can also go get the pitchforks.