Wikipedia editors serving long sentences in Saudi Arabia since 2020

This is wrong on every level except technical[0]. While other countries in Europe aren't as free-speech extremist as the US, there are still protections on speech in those countries. The biggest exception to that I can see in France or Germany would be the constitutional prohibitions on being a literal Nazi[1].

I Googled "romanian arrested for opinions" and got a bunch of stuff about Andrew Tate. To be clear, he wasn't arrested for opinions, he was arrested for running a sex trafficking ring.

I'll give you that the UK has some really scary anti-protest laws. Though to be clear, when I Googled "UK arrested for thoughts" I got one article about someone being arrested for praying in front of an abortion clinic, written by someone with an axe to grind about abortions. I've seen worse - I'm reminded of the recent push to ban Extinction Rebellion protests in that same country.

Without more specifics I can't elaborate further beyond "UK bad".

>there is no second (amendment) anywhere else

sigh

Say it with me now: The 2nd Amendment is not an adequate backstop against the abuse of government power.

As a specific response to things the Brits did in the colonies, it's fine. But if there's, say, a fascist uprising in the US, I do not expect private gun ownership to save me. The amount of power that a government can wield in order to roadkill you is absolutely enormous, and makes your pile of AR-15s look like child's play. In order to fight back against tyranny, you need consensus about what the tyranny even is, and that's a whole load of collective action problems. They're also adversarial - as in, if the threat is internal, then your adversary is going to use this against you. If the tyranny only affects a small group of people, then they will not have the power to fight back, even in the case where they would need to resort to guns.

[0] Well, they don't call it the First Amendment...

[1] To be clear, this is an act of self-defense against censorship. Nazis do not give two shits about your freedom of speech, except if they can use the 1st Amendment to eat itself. Affording them freedom of speech is a fool's errand.

Have you tried explaining them to your liberal friends in San Francisco? Their English is probably even better, but for some reason they still constantly fail to appreciate those concepts.

Turkiye has not been a secular nation for a very long time. Go read hurriyetdailynews.com, a moderately pro-government site. Currently the government is trying to make it illegal to be gay by attaching it to a bill that supposedly protects the rights of turbanli (covered women). The full text of the bill practically Turkiye into every other shariah nation.

Also read up on "Imam hatips", which are failed religious school the government forces us to pay for. Nobody wants to go to them, because the educational quality is garbage, so they actually started forcing students to go to them.

Mustafa Kemal Ataturk's democracy could have been the most inspiring democracy the world has known, but the democracy itself died within 10 years of him. I think we're on our 6th constitution since then.

During the 2 year "state of emergency" after the coup, he rewrote the entire constitution.

Currently there are over 250 politicians in prison from the HDP (Kurdish party), and EVERY major name in the CHP is being prosecuted, or has been convicted of "insulting the cumhuriyet" in the past 3 months.. This is the most democratic nation in the ummah. :(