My Prime Minister, Jacinda is being excessive

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Firstly I would like to clarify as a New Zealander I am a strong Labour party supporter. I, for the most part, approve of Jacinda Ardern. She is committed to strengthening the social fabric of our country and turning us into a more compassionate humanitarian-minded nation. I also approve of her response to the Christchurch terror attack, she helped give comfort to communities, take the necessary legislative action on guns and reinforce the values of diversity.

However, in one area, I feel wary and that is on her government's actions around freedom of speech. I strongly disapprove of it and I am worried. I fear the impacts that could result from increased government involvement. And a greater role they have in determining what is appropriate speech. I respect the intentions but I cannot approve of this allocation of power. Why should the Manifesto be illegal? Will it stop a potential shooter from viewing it. or will it just create an ugly precedent in which a government has a justification to restrict content?

And if you are left wing and approve of this, let me just say I respect your line of thinking. But if you approve of government regulating hate speech then you must consider how this power could then be used with an ideological opponent comes to power. In that case, there is no logical reason why a government that is racist and seeks to infringe on the rights of others couldn't use such a precedent should it become normalized to do horrible actions.

Apart from the initial whoopsie at pointing the finger of blame westward, she has done an excellent job in regards to the Christchurch crisis...
Amazing woman...

Any attack on freedom of speech/thought is a serious concern to me personally...
People/governments have a tendency to over-react...
I hope this won't be the case here...
Might be time to pack up and move to America...

Banning that stuff was a bad move. I read the manifesto and regularly read some of the sites in question that have been banned by New Zealand. It disturbs me that some of these free speech areas of the Internet are being characterized as white supremicist or some kind of hate speech. There is a high population of autistic thought and positive autistic characterization on the free speech areas of the Internet. THAT has been fascinating and wonderful for me to witness. If a crowd of autists were threatening ME with their logic and good sense, I might be tempted to scatter myself in their crowd and loudly shout out some opposite ideas, you know? Then who can tell which one is the rebel rouser and which one is the true crowd?

I am a research sociologist who studies autistic adults, for those of you who did not know. I have not actively been doing anything for awhile. Just reading and observing.

So banning something like the manifesto suggests that it has dangerous ideas, and also makes it desirable. It gives the benign ideas in it power they did not have on their own. For example, in the manifesto, the dude kept talking about birth rates. Big deal. But OH, if we CAN’T KNOW that, all of a sudden that idea of birth rates has power and we can attach all our negative feelings to it. Start hating big families who look different, force ourselves to produce giant Duggar-size white families that we can’t support. People wouldn’t have cared if they could have been allowed to read it freely in the first place. They wouldn’t have been interested.

I know zero about this lady who is your president or prime minister or whatever. All I know about New Zealand is Once Were Warriors and OMC. But I ask you to consider, if you do like her, what if she is not making all the decisions? It takes a village after all. Maybe someone else is pressuring her to make some of these decisions. The people of New Zealand have to make their wishes clear.

Inciting violence is illegal in almost every country, and I think it is appropriate for governments to ban texts which incite violence. There's even a good case for banning texts which incite hatred, but that would be more controversial. I feel like the horse has bolted and I probably wouldn't have made this call myself, but I really can't bring myself to care.

I do think the proposed punishments are overly harsh. Some people are going to be curious and that's basically harmless. People shouldn't go to prison for this, but it could potentially be used as e.g. evidence of malicious planning if someone commits a hate crime while in possession of this.

As for an authoritarian government coming to power and censoring anti-racism - a hypothetical racist NZ government isn't going to care about whether or not it has precedent on its side. The thing to be concerned about is somebody being fined when their remarks get taken out of context in a way that changes their meaning, or a judge not properly understanding an element of youth culture. I was worried after a few silly cases in the UK last year, but these have been overturned on appeal.

Walrus, I’m sorry, you misunderstood, I believe, literally everything I said.

I don’t use the names of other websites here on WP because it invites other people here to go there. It’s like being in a Clorox factory and talking about buying Lysol. I assume Alex makes his living with web traffic and I’m not trying to take away from it. The site you mentioned was not what I was mainly talking about anyway.

What I really wanted to address though, and then I’m done talking about it, is that in some of these free speech areas, yes, you have a lot of autistic (and other different) people sharing very different ideas. Like the person talking about how to grow potatoes in tires. The Bosnian war survivor giving his account of survival. The SERBIAN who then gave HIS account. The antifa and correct the record people who anonymously get on and share what they are doing to take down the people they hate. The conservative people or yes, even neo nazis who try to take down the antifas and correct the record people. There was once a thread of male rape victims telling their stories. I mean, good lord, where are you going to find information like that?

Yeah you gotta sort through some crap, but honestly, I truly believe most of the hate crap is there purposely to dissuade people from reading and contributing. It’s not internet for the faint of heart. I am a 42 years old metalhead, who grew up in the country, bullied by real white supremicists who didn’t care for my fancy northern accent (my mom is northern). I will definitely scroll through that stuff to get to interesting posts. And trust me, some of them are SUPER autistic. I’m not saying MOST people should go looking for free speech internet to read. Deep knowledge probably isn’t good for most people. I’m just saying that banning it is a bad idea.