[perl4ever]

>Contrary to popular (American) opinion laws regulating speech are in fact not a new and authoritarian invention but have existed in the so called 'West' for literally centuries

It's common sense that without a history in the West of regulating free speech, there wouldn't have been a first amendment in the US. You don't have to know what the regulations were.

So you are not just generalizing Americans as ignorant of history, but also as unable to use basic logic.

[Barrin92]

It's common sense that many American institutions are a reactions to old European institutions, and you don't need to know that history if you don't care, but if you want to have a discussion about speech in Canada (which is still part of the Commonwealth and the topic of this thread), you better have an actual idea of the way those countries function rather than applying your standards to them.

If you want to claim you have an idea whether the American reaction and discarding of old norms was actually a good idea nor not, you need to have an actual understanding about what the ideas you were discarding were actually for. Otherwise you're actually ignorant, and arrogant and that is a bad long term combination.

[IgorPartola]

That is the most American response I could have read. It’s basically “well I don’t have to know the history. I can just trust that our brilliant founding fathers got it right.”

[perl4ever]

>It’s basically “well I don’t have to know the history. I can just trust that our brilliant founding fathers got it right.”

Not at all.

I claimed any person with common sense can assume that the US "founding fathers" were reacting to something.

And I didn't claim that Americans are or aren't devoid of common sense. You can read it either way.