Eh, countries like Germany seem to have managed OK with banning nazi symbols - it hasn't proven to be a slippery slope leading to a ban on criticising the government, or anything like that.

It didn't work the first time[1]:

> Researching my book, I looked into what actually happened in the Weimar Republic. I found that, contrary to what most people think, Weimar Germany did have hate-speech laws, and they were applied quite frequently. The assertion that Nazi propaganda played a significant role in mobilizing anti-Jewish sentiment is, of course, irrefutable. But to claim that the Holocaust could have been prevented if only anti-Semitic speech and Nazi propaganda had been banned has little basis in reality. Leading Nazis such as Joseph Goebbels, Theodor Fritsch, and Julius Streicher were all prosecuted for anti-Semitic speech. Streicher served two prison sentences. Rather than deterring the Nazis and countering anti-Semitism, the many court cases served as effective public-relations machinery, affording Streicher the kind of attention he would never have found in a climate of a free and open debate.

and some are saying it's not working now[2]:

> For the Michalskis, all this was evidence that German society never truly reckoned with anti-Semitism after the war. Germany had restored synagogues and built memorials to the victims of the Holocaust, Wenzel said: “So for a lot of mainstream, middle-class people, that means: ‘We’ve done it. We dealt with anti-Semitism.’ But nobody really dealt with it within the families. The big, the hard, the painful questions were never asked.” In Wenzel’s view, the Muslim students who tormented his child were acting in an environment that was already suffused with native anti-Semitism. “A lot of conservative politicians now say, ‘Oh, the Muslims are importing their anti-Semitism to our wonderful, anti-anti-Semitic culture,’ ” he said. “That’s bull. They’re trying to politicize this.”

[1] https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/copenhagen-speech-v...

[2] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/21/magazine/anti-semitism-ge...

Germany has strong protections for individual freedoms and privacy in their constitution, precisely to avoid an illiberal government from arising ever again. The Nazi ban is effectively the lone exception to the rule.

This said, European police generally gets away with a degree of prevarication that North Americans would find unconceivable. The US constitution enshrines the rights of individuals over government, in a way that no European country can match (as far as I know).

> This said, European police generally gets away with a degree of prevarication that North Americans would find unconceivable.

Not to be inflammatory, but North American police generally gets away with a degree of murder that Europeans find inconceivable.

Stop the straw man please. No one is going around killing citizens. Something like nine unarmed people per year are killed by US police out of 10 million interactions.

From 2015 to 2020Q1, 753 unarmed people were killed by US police for an average of about 145/year or approximately one every 60 hours / 2.5 days.

Key quote: "The victims were unarmed in 1 in 6 (753;16%) fatal shootings."

https://www.bmj.com/company/newsroom/fatal-police-shootings-...

For balance, this 2018 gives lower numbers - hovering around 60ish per year. Although that is still significantly higher than 9.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/fatal-police-s...

Nice statistic, but killings by police are 28 per million in the states versus 1.3 in Germany/France:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enfo...

That's total deaths caused by police. It would obviously be higher in the US because the criminals are more likely to have and use guns, policemen in the US just can't afford the peaceful approaches most policemen in Europe can. That doesn't mean they get away with more.

The jailing and fining of holocaust deniers is pretty slippery, I'd say.

No, without existence, there can be no democracy or democratic representation. Being allowed to exist is the most fundamental right.

If you don't exist you don't have rights to defend. Did you mean the right to life, as in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?

That's precisely my point. Food, water, shelter, air, and good health, are all required before one can begin to pursue the right to free speech.

No, those life essentials are not required _before_ getting the right to freedom-of-speech. Indeed, freedom of speech may be essential to discussing how to arrange a society to enable the procurement of those things. Holding off freedom of speech until "basic needs" are met is, to me, a way to guarantee that a tyrant in a poor country stays in power.

Ultimately, those life necessities must be provided by oneself or by someone else, or some combination. Freedom of speech can allow for the best ways of providing these things to be selected. The alternative is that only the prevailing view is considered or approved, often leading to much worse provision of these necessities, including starvation (feudal systems, communism, warlords, etc.).

You can speak without air?