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Moving from the United States *to* a country like Canada -- a country where a woman was recently fined 10k for being mean in a private conversation -- because they're hoping to have more freedom of speech?

You mean whether one wants to use their speech to express their personal opinions about an individual's personal choices in a private conversation or to publicly support and organization whose goal is the genocide of the Jews.

The discussion here is about a Palestinian who was deported for supporting Hamas under a law which says it's illegal to support terrorist organizations on a student visa. Canada has a law, most European countries have the same law. This isn't new.

You know, the website you're on is hosted in Germany. Supporting Hamas is fully illegal there too. Are you sure you want to support a regional authority which committed numerous acts of terrorism? You'll get to find out exactly how much free speech there is in Germany if you're not careful.

Germany can and does arrest people for social media posts: https://www.aa.com.tr/en/europe/berlin-police-arrest-pro-palestinian-woman-for-writing-from-the-river-to-the-sea-on-social-media/3165593?utm_source=chatgpt.com

In fact, Germany deported a bunch of people for the exact same thing.

https://www.euronews.com/2025/04/03/four-foreign-activists-face-deportation-from-germany-after-berlin-university-sit-in

There has also been discussion in the UK of doing the same thing under similar laws.

I'd also like you to consider that there are two examples of heinous invasions by horrible states recently -- if Russians were going out to different countries to protest against Ukraine's handling of the war in Ukraine, would you be opposed to deporting them? I'd be perfectly OK with sending them back to Russia if they love it there so much. If you're here on a student visa, you should be studying and not protesting. Ironically, Russia's was far less of a war crime than that of Hamas, but nobody seems to care about the red line war crimes Hamas has committed and continues to commit by holding civilian hostages.

If you think that supporting a terrorist organization in public on a student visa is actually better than expressing sincere concern to ostensibly a friend in private, then I think you need to reconsider your moral frameworks.

You're doing a fact check for a fact that wasn't in the discussion. You have not in this discussion referred to any person you could be referring to when you say "he", and I'm aware of the contents of the links I showed you and the links I didn't show you that I based my post on, and none of them refer to whoever or whatever you are referring to as well.

Now, you might think you're referring to where I said: "The discussion here is about a Palestinian who was deported for supporting Hamas under a law which says it's illegal to support terrorist organizations on a student visa." -- but if you're correcting that line, you're making a mistake because the stories I dug up were all as I described, and while I laid out my terms, you did not. I'll admit however, I erred in incorrectly laying out exactly what I was referring to, I probably should have dropped a link to the stories.

I looked this up before replying to you the first time, so I know many deportations were people on student visas alleged to be supporting Hamas. I can dig up many links if you'd like. So the best you can say is not "you're wrong about the facts", it's "you're right about those cases, and here are other cases in addition". My facts are straight, even if there are more facts that add nuance to the discussion and straighten the facts further.

The key factual elements I've brought up have been factual, and you haven't brought up any factuals in response until now, and what you've brought is incomplete -- some "he" who happens to fulfill your requirements.

Let's regroup a bit and look at what's happened already:

You started this discussion by specifically calling out the US as particularly bad for freedom of speech. I countered by pointing out a recent case where a Canadian was fined $10k for a private conversation.

Your response: "I suppose it depends on whether one wants to use one's speech to verbally abuse tenants or to protest war crimes." is comparing a case where a lady who considered another lady a friend and in an off-line, private conversation between two people who considered each other friends said she didn't agree with that lady going through transgender surgery in part because of her mother's double mastectomy complications resulting in a fine of $10k to a class of situations where people were deported for anti-Israel protests under laws which are intended to prevent people from expressing support for terrorist organizations such as Hamas. You is implicitly accepting the private discussion as less worthy of protection than public dissent by characterizing both in the least charitable way possible. Honestly, the correct answer should be that neither form of speech policing is acceptable -- or at the very least, that they are both last resorts we need to be deeply skeptical of even if we disagree with the message itself. However, having to watch what you say in private conversations lest the state punish you is a universal trope in dystopian literature for a reason: It's a dangerous and overwhelming insertion of the state into one's private life. There's a worthwhile discussion to be had about how governments define "support" and how that plays out, but that worthwhile discussion is largely blurred in this conversation for reasons I'll discuss in my conclusion.

I then countered by showing that some anti-israel protesters -- particularly in Germany where the server you are using resides -- have been either deported or arrested in Germany, and I also pointed out that any such deportations are under laws which are in effect in each country mentioned, showing that similar laws exist and that they have either been utilized in similar ways or it has been discussed. This showed that the idea that to "protest war crimes" isn't something uniquely unprotected in the United States.

To be honest, there are actually lots of avenues one could take to break my argument. You could argue that the cases I'm citing aren't as important as similar ones in America. You could argue that you were referring to scientific freedom of speech rather than contemporary freedom of speech (though you'd have to show how one region is markedly better than the other), you could have even gate kept me out of the discussion with a "you know, we're not really talking about that and even the freedom of speech part was only a piece of the whole that's more important" which I probably couldn't have done anything about because I'm not equipped for a full discussion of science funding. You could likely make convincing arguments about my argument tactics such as switching frames or that things I saw in one way were actually intended in another way. That last one if you did it convincingly would be devastating to my argument. Honestly, I actually like it when someone can make me step back. Another way you could have broken the back of my argument was to specifically show that the lady who was fined 10k really did deserve it, for example by showing up at the tenants house every day to lecture them even after being told to leave them alone or something equally outrageous.

If you're going to lecture someone about getting the facts straight, you should be doing it with a little more precision.

More importantly than any of this, we're witnessing a broad degradation of liberal speech norms—where the boundaries of “acceptable dissent” are being enforced not just in the US, but increasingly throughout the Western world. Whether the trigger is something the left finds sancrosanct or the right finds sancrosanct (though the right is presently largely out of institutional power globally), the state has gotten comfortable with legal tools to punish thoughtcrimes. We should be paying attention to that as a general theme, not just pointing and laughing at a particular country we think is doing it slightly faster. While many worldviews may not paint this as a particular problem, liberalism and human rights are the moral framework through which the current world order retains legitimacy. Without legitimacy, it's probable that another framework, such as dictatorship or theocracy, will rise, or that without legitimacy the current regimes will simply grind to a halt, as has happened in the past. If we're busy sniping at one another for the bits and pieces where one country is better than another, we'll miss that we're all drowning.

In this regard, we might be able to agree that post-9/11 USA did set the western world down this path with its reduced scrutiny in the face of terrorism, but unfortunately the truth is there's nowhere one can escape the totalizing state worship that regulates people's personal speech, and the fact that the government agrees with you this week and allows your speech is no guarantee of future protection.