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Comment by squozzer | Hacker News Reader

I think we're past the point where differences in political opinion can be aired without fear of violent retaliation.

The UK had a live-fire civil war until the late 90s. Violence has long been marginalised, but it's always there on the edge and as a possibility (police or demonstrators) at every demo.

Not only that, but the live-fire civil war was to do with the region at the heart of the current Brexit deal dispute: Northern Ireland, and its border with Ireland.

An MP (Jo Cox) was murdered (I don't think it's too strong to say assassinated) during the Brexit campaign.

...by someone with a mental illness.

The court ruled that he was sane at the time of the murder, and it was extremely pre-meditated. And incited by all the far right material he had been reading.

Mental illness doesn't comprehensively eliminate culpability. The mental illness would have to explain why the act wasn't murder. Such as: the defendant was unable to foresee the act would cause death; the defendant believed they were acting in self defence.

In this case someone with a history of mental illness still premeditated to commit a political assassination.

He murdered her for a reason: he was a violent racist. His defense never maintained that he was insane and a judge determined that it was an ideologically-motivated murder.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Jo_Cox#Perpetrator

"He had searched the internet for information about the British National Party, apartheid, the Ku Klux Klan, prominent Jewish people, matricide,white supremacism, Nazism, Waffen SS, Israel, public shootings, serial killers, William Hague, Ian Gow (another assassinated MP), and Norwegian far-right terrorist Anders Behring Breivik (about whose case he collected newspaper clippings)."

He also happened to be mentally ill, but that hardly seems relevant. Suppose Hitler was bipolar (he wasn't, but suppose he was), that would hardly be exculpatory.

It's always weird to see people talk like the UK politics have suddenly become tense and high stakes in the last few years. Brexit, for all the anger, is not what "expect violent retaliation for airing your views" looks like. Last time there was a major schism over UK authority, that did happen, and it involved death squads.

I suspect a lot of the people who think "expect violent retaliation for airing your views" is in any way new turn out to be racists who aren't used to being called on it.

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