Reality is now beyond parody. I don't even know what to say about this aggressive legislation of emotion... because it might be construed in the near future as hatred by someone in Canada, and I could be extradited to enjoy a very long holiday.
In that post and in those threads it seemed to only apply to owners of online platforms (like the EU digital markets act) and that was all that was discussed.
This thread is about a different aspect of the bill which is about regulating and punishing non-harmful word based "offenses" by human persons.
It is trope in legislation that is good and required to try to sneak in sections that are damaging and not required so both have to be passed. That seems to be the case here. It is good for this to be highlighted to potentially improve the bill.
It's still the same story and the 'life in prison' stuff sounds a lot like the whale sushi thing. It's just how HN dupery works, most stories don't get (or need) a second front page run just because someone is covering them from a different angle or as minor details dribble out. Additionally, proposed legislation is largely HN-offtopic anyway until it becomes actual legislation.
This very vague statement can be used in many unexpected (or expected) ways. But yeah, it's common to try to sneak these things in in "won't someone think of the children!?" bills. That way anyone that objects to the bad part of the bill can be painted as supporting abhorrent acts.
Sure, it’s a very subjective term. But if you read even the oldest laws which we take for granted, those concepts (such as “reasonableness”) are designed to be open to interpretation. If someone were to stand trial for this, it would be up to the Court to determine whether what they said satisfies the definition provided by the legislation, and that in and of itself is a lengthy process that is designed to be as just as possible, which I can say with some certainty because Canada’s rule of law is relatively good. There are absolutely merits to the policy considerations of this term but what statutory interpretation guidelines haven’t covered, the case law will eventually iron out. In any case, this is not the type of vague wording which triggers an Orwellian collapse.
The vagueness is the step towards it. And it's easy to think about cases where the vagueness might be. For example: opinions for and against the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Or choose some other splitting issue in society.
A change in government to another party may use the same law but in opposite directions to what you or I might think is acceptable. Will one be able to speak truth to power if the power says the truth is harmful?
There are of course going to be many clear cut cases in this new law. I would even go so far to say the majority of them are going to be obvious cases of hatred no matter what politics and beliefs one has.
But almost all of these cases will be covered by existing laws! It's already illegal. So why the new law? What's it really about?
Plus, if something goes wrong, I can guarantee there will be more than enough objection to it… people have a track record of leaping to the opportunity to defend freedom, even at the cost of common sense.
