• wise_pancake@lemmy.ca
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    6 hours ago

    It makes me very uncomfortable to make speech and holding opinions (whether factual or not) illegal.

    It sets a dangerous precedent and is a double edged sword. What if we’d declared criticizing internment camps or the 60’s scoop as hateful prejudice against Canada? What if the next government makes speaking against oil illegal?

    Education and acknowledgement is the answer. We need to continue making everything about residential schools public. It should be easy to see evidence of their practices, know who ran them, how many children died and where they’re buried, etc. It should be obvious this happened and was awful.

    • Victor Villas@lemmy.ca
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      3 hours ago

      This slope is not slippery at all. Denying holocaust has been a crime since 2002 1994 in Germany and yet Germany had no issues with upkeeping free speech in the two three decades since.

      edit: oops it’s actually older than I thought

      • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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        1 hour ago

        TIL it’s that recent. I know there was at least some anti-Nazi laws from the start.

        The slope gets slippery at some point, though, right? I don’t think it’s a stupid thing to worry about, even if ultimately this is the right choice.

        • Victor Villas@lemmy.ca
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          46 minutes ago

          The slope gets slippery at some point, though, right? I don’t think it’s a stupid thing to worry about

          Sure. I wouldn’t like to see climate change denialism criminalized in this century and I’d be pretty worried if any government pushed for it - but we’re so so far away from something like that happening. We’re way closer to going backwards in reconciliation.

    • CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org
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      4 hours ago

      Censorship should make us uncomfortable for all those reasons, but I think history has shown hate speech can’t be beaten with just reason. Whether this specific proposal is worth the precedent is another question on top of that, though.

      • wise_pancake@lemmy.ca
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        4 hours ago

        I’m not against it for the tolerance/intolerence aspect, I’m against it for the potential weaponization.

        Could a future government say “woke” speech is hate speech? That’s why I think we need to be careful.