Woah hold the hyperbole. I want to give you the benefit of the doubt.
What actions specifically are you even referring to? The change in gun laws? Australia banned semi-automatics. It’s survived. Pretty sure New Zealand will be okay without them too.
This post is about the ISPs banning sites, not something that the government of either country directed. (As the post makes clear Australia’s largest telco is also banning these sites.)
> I’m all for the debate, but as an American it’s unimaginable to see such reactionary, arbitrary, far sweeping action taken by a supposed free country with almost no discussion or legal process.
What was far sweeping and done with no discussion or legal process? You pretend like there isn’t a parliament with elected members, a far more representative and democratic parliament that any US government due to the use of proportional representation. This parliament is the legislative branch and can, well enact legislation, which is doing to ban semi automatic weapons based on the results of previous government enquiries into the matter that weren’t acted on.
(Talk about throwing stones here, seemingly nobody remembers 9/11 and the Patriot Act, and mass spying on Americans, and trillions spent on false wars that followed.)
A civil debate about the actions of these ISPs and the ability of private companies operating as utilities to censor or throttle or otherwise mess with neutrality of the utility they provide is very much warranted, but you’re not doing that here.
http://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/1993/0094/55.0/DLM...
Admittedly, the Chief Censor only published his decision on tuesday, so everything the ISPs were doing before then, they did on their own.
Plenty of parallels between the two. People are hurt in the filming of both. It's damaging to the survivors. It feeds into the fetishes of those who would watch such a thing (it's a snuff film). In the case of this film I could argue that potential perpetrators could study the film for their own plans.
Should the events be discussed? Absolutely. But I don’t have to watch these things to understand how abhorrent they are.
The ban will be done in parliament over then next week or so, looks like 95%+ of the currently elected MPs will vote for the change, all major parties in parliament, left and right, have publicly said that they agree with the changes.
Remember that less than one person in 15 in NZ has a gun license, and even fewer own semi-automatics, it's a small minority affected by this change, it's not all that controversial (in NZ)
Free speech is the right to express an opinion without being penalised. Left wing and right wing lunatics are free to distribute their wicked thoughts online, just as the US gun lobby and alt-right fanatics are free to publish whatever they like on the fifth amendment. Fine with me. It doesn’t hurt or ‘harm’ anyone.
A video of a fascist wacko shooting 50 people down is not freedom of speech. It’s illegal and sick.
Don’t confuse the two.
Actually it does. Even hate speech is free speech in the US.
> or spread unlawful things online
That's not a free speech violation then. The video in question is not classified, doesn't break any laws, it just depicts a horrible act. Should we make all war documentaries illegal too?
> Free speech is the right to express an opinion without being penalised
So you just contradicted your first point. If I, for example, say "you're an idiot", it's an opinion, it's protected speech (in the US at least).
AU doesn't have free speech except political speech, and has been making some Orwellian moves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_speech_by_country#A...
NZ has the Bill of Rights of 1990 that states:
"Everyone has the right to freedom of expression, including the freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and opinions of any kind in any form."
So it seems that any censorship would directly contradict that.
As others have pointed out, most countries allow for exceptions to free speech in cases constituting hate speech - the fact that the US does not is a neutral fact, and an appeal to free speech absolutism doesn’t really constitute an argument for why other countries should uphold the same standards of free speech.
On Australia: we have a different political system here to the US, which is similar to NZ. While our governments are different to the UK in that parliament has enumerated powers, we don’t require fundamental rights to be explicitly defined in the constitution. The provision for freedom of political speech for instance was built up when it became apparent that the way in which we want our society to operate requires such an interpretation of our constitution. On the other hand, the US system requires a constitutional amendment for issues relating to constitutional law and fundamental rights outlined in the constitution. Both systems have their merits and demerits, but the fact that ours doesn’t work in the way that the US’s does isn’t an argument against it.
The USA is the sole major exception.
any US government? Do you understand that many state-level governments are proportionally representative?
Off the top of my head, the government has: used the existing regulatory system to temporarily halt sales of the sort weapons used in the terrorist attack; introduced legislation into parliament to permanently halt sales of the sort of weapons used in the attack, which will proceed through the regular legislative process; announced plans to investigate how the attack was not prevented by security services; and facilitated memorial services for victims.
Namely the banning of the manifesto. Blocking images of violence is one thing. But making the leap to blocking ideas is on a whole other level. I’m all for de-platforming. No one should be forced to host your vile content, legal or not. But for the government of your country to ban a specific string of characters as a criminal matter is terrifying.
The manifesto was a presentation of a political viewpoint (and perhaps a call to action - I don't know, I haven't read it). The manifesto qualifies as speech.
The video was a record of a criminal act of great violence. I wouldn't classify the video as speech. (In contrast, a fictional portrayal of the same acts but made with actors and no-one dying would be speech).
For now.
The lessons learned and recorded through 2000 years of Western history, starting with the Greeks and culminating in the American revolution, was that such things can never be relied upon unless guaranteed by law.
It suppose it wouldn't actually be hard for them to seize the copyright (perhaps with a new law if required) and start issuing DMCA takedowns or threats of lawsuits.
The takedowns that Facebook and YouTube have been performing started immediately after the attack loooooong before the video was classified as objectionable. This is because Facebook and YouTube do not want to distribute these videos. That’s all.
But the Office of Film and Literature Classification is literally a government agency, according to Wikipedia. Maybe it's staffed by bureaucrats rather than elected officials, but it's still government censorship. MPAA, on the other hand, is a trade association, and compliance with its ratings is purely voluntary.
>It must meet the definitions under the law that the office operators under. [...] It is checked by the ability of the judicial branch to evaluate these cases against the definition in the law.
I wouldn't count on this, given how vague the the law is, and how useless constitution is (see comment elsewhere in this thread).
>And the law can be changed by the citizens electing new representation and giving mandate for that to be done.
That's a final backstop, but if there's active government censorship going on, how can the results of the subsequent election be trusted?
The law that makes this material objectionable is the same one that makes child pornography illegal, and it should be obvious that it wouldn't work very well if each video involving sex with children had to be classified as objectionable before it became illegal.
The criteria are here:
https://www.dia.govt.nz/Censorship-Objectionable-and-Restric...
And the government is literally arresting people for distributing the video.
I'm really struggling to see how this could be construed as a non-government action.
As a Crown entity the Classification Office is accountable to the New Zealand public - it must perform its functions efficiently, transparently, and in a financially responsible manner.
The Minister of Internal Affairs is responsible for managing the Government's relationship with the Classification Office."
Edit: I see now they have banned it, and the "manifesto" too. https://www.classificationoffice.govt.nz/news/latest-news/ch...
But also these people:
22 year old: https://abcnews.go.com/ABCNews/zealand-man-22-arrested-alleg...
44 yo male: https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/news/article.cfm?c_id=1&object...
This woman was arrested for hateful commentary (not distributing the video, just comments): https://www.nzherald.co.nz/index.cfm?objectid=12214654&ref=t...
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6820769/Teen-accuse...
>The accused teenage Facebook poster appeared in Christchurch District Court on Monday and was granted an interim name suppression order, but he was denied bail by Judge Stephen O'Driscoll.
https://www.9news.com.au/2019/03/18/14/49/christchurch-shoot...
That he did it online, or didn't realise that saying vile things would have undesirable consequences shouldn't excuse the behaviour.
(N.B I think he should be charged with something, but I don't think prison time is a fair response to his actions).
That isn't the case in NZ; Most of the population trusts the government and value's collective good above individual liberty, the policies and responses to events like these are born out of our culture and focus on those values. It's apples & oranges with the US culture of valuing individual liberty.
I do feel that to say that it's solely personal responsibility is to disregard easily mislead demographics (specifically the youth). Of course the plan is to educate them so that they can reason these situations out for themselves, but until then it's societies duty to look out for them, and to ensure they're not being exposed to unnecessarily harmful views.
Personally, I believe some people can't actually be reasoned with all that well; You can try, but eventually you exhaust yourself without ever changing there mind; What's the saying about "the world changes when old men die"?
As a final counter-point. My understanding is that Osama Bin Laden never personally attacked the US. It was his hate speech that incited violence, it was his ideology that was his weapon. The response to that was to condemn a man who was not US citizen to death without ever having a trial. I'm not saying he shouldn't have been killed; I'm asking why one incitement of violence, of hate speech; is acceptable and should be allowed when another is not? (keeping in mind that both are in relation to a terrorist attack).
It's a modern American stance that dates back to the 1969 case of Brandenburg v. Ohio. The reason that this particular standard for free speech, formulated by the US Supreme Court has permeated segments of the English-speaking world is an example of the cultural dominance of the United States, and internet culture.
Besides bin Laden, another even more striking case is the cleric, a US citizen, who was killed in a drone strike in Yemen because of his advocacy of violence. And no sane person who values their freedom, in the English-speaking west, would dare advocate on behalf of ISIS today.
No society in human history has permitted absolute free speech, and the United States doesn't either.
Bin Laden was directly responsible for the planning and support for attacks on the USA and others. Wikipedia is a good place to start with links to items, including transcripts etc.
I emotional agree it is hard to trust the masses to do the right thing, never the less, we have to. It’s the only way. Everything else leads to opression.
To use an example of an obscure half-joking religion just say calling Pastafarians a bunch of stupid useless colander-heads is hateful speech but not hate speech. Saying that we should all go out tomorrow and lynch Pastafarians would be religious intimidation and captures where the wrong is - not the speech but the actual 'verbal assault'.
When the 1st amendment was written the US had approximately the same population as new Zealand does now (4M versus 5M). New Zealand is about the size and popolation of Oregon.
Our political landscape is wildly different, simply because we are so much smaller, and we don't have states.
Our politicians and our government are not "them": they are us. This is the general feeling towards the Muslim community too We all (including our politicians) see the affects of policy upon our friends and family, because most New Zealanders have direct connections to a range of backgrounds.
The US Supreme Court only set the modern boundaries for freedom of speech in Brandenburg v Ohio in 1969.
There are plenty of times in history when overwhelming majorities beliefs took away minority rights.
When reading the wrong words can get you 10 years in prison, it probably does trend towards Orwell's future though.
So in a country of ~330 million, with 32 million flights every year across the US, would you mind listing the total number of times that actually happens? Where people are detained for years with no due process by that 60,000 force. If something happens a few times per year at that scale, while being shameful non-the-less, it's a freak outlier in fact and is not a legitimate example of common outcomes to support your comment.
At the same time, countries that don't bother with stuff like that, but instead regulate who can own firearms much more stringently than US does - e.g. Czech Republic - are doing fine.
Magazine capacity limits are relevant in principle, but the problem is enforcement - they're just too simple to effectively regulate. Even defining what a limit is can be hard, given that it's a box with a spring, so the limit inherently depends on what cartridges can fit and feed. As Canada has found out, this means that a 5-round magazine can be a 15-round magazine sometimes. But even when you have a clear definition that accounts for all such shenanigans, good luck enforcing it when one can make high-cap mag bodies by cutting legal ones, and duck taping them together. Again, it's a metal box with a spring, not even curved in many calibers; most complicated parts are the follower and the feed lips, and those are the same regardless of capacity.
I'd still look at their definitions first, though, because in most countries (and US states) that limit magazine capacity, a full-sized magazine that is blocked internally by some kind of pin is perfectly legal, and yet that pin takes about 50 seconds to remove without breaking the magazine. There's a lot more security theater about gun laws in most places than people realize.
I think you'd have said the same thing about New Zealand a week and a half ago, yet here we are.
OTOH, looking at New Zealand's eligibility laws, one thing that stands out to me is the lack of a mandatory mental health exam. So it's like US in that regard - only already-diagnosed mental health issues can block ownership.
I think you need to go re-read some Orwell books.
What 'curbing of freedom' do you see happening, exactly?
Even compared with the patriot act and the war against Iraq?
I'm most horrified by people's defense of the government getting really good at arresting people for "trolling"[1]
[1]: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/police-arresting-nine-peo...