Irishman arrested in UK for 'causing anxiety' by retweeting meme
irishmirror.ie
irishmirror.ie
Good to know some people are more concerned about the reporting on overstepping than the overstepping itself.
A law exists in the UK about using public communications networks to send grossly offensive or indecent communications.
Somebody complained to the police that this chap had maybe broken that law, and from the embedded video, it sounds like he wasn't willing to come voluntarily to the interview room.
So what do the police do? Tell the complainant, sorry, you feel like you're a victim of crime but the alleged offender wasn't willing to be arrested?
Nobody is picking ideologies to enforce. I don't see how the content of the supposed offensive tweet, is relevant to the decision to interview this chap under caution.
Why? Why is this any of the government's business?
As to why the behaviour needs legislating: because the British social contract required it, because in British society they're willing to trade the right to say grossly offensive things to people, for protection against hearing grossly offensive things. Lots of reasons, it's fine for them, you don't often hear clamour to repeal the law, they don't have the same issue with it that you do. So who are you to tell Brits that they shouldn't have a law?
Why make all of this up? Just so you can call someone a meddling busybody for having an opinion in a thread that you're also posting an opinion in?
Ultimately it's a question of consent and the social contract. My answer, which you're critical of here, is that ultimately the government have consent of the people to enforce this law and therefore it's the government's business. It's consented by the Brits, there is not democratic clamour to rewrite that law, and it's not for other countries to impose their values here. I hope you don't think I'm being pedantic, I'm just trying to answer the question that was put to me; why, in the UK, is this a regulated behaviour
I doubt it represents British society's desire. It's more likely a case of "when you're a hammer everything looks like a nail". MPs feel that their job is to always legislate. Let's not forget that since the 90s raves have been illegal in the UK.
Would you rather pay them to do nothing at all, or maybe adopt the US model where they spend a year of their term campaigning on the public's dime?
Probably most people in Iran agree with the laws that gay people should be executed.
Based on your "social contract" theory, that's just fine? I mean, who are you to tell the Iranians that they shouldn't have a law? Right?
UK is democratic and the elected reps' body is sovereign over law.
An Iranian cannot stand for election in her region on the platform of: I am going to repeal "Islamic" law.
A person can stand for election in the UK saying: vote for me and we'll repeat the 2003 Communications Act.
I don't think that you didn't know this, so I don't understand why you asked it really
Sorry, no.
Shouting abuse at someone in public can see the law involved, and that is the same if the public space is online.
Ok, so why is it the government's business if you are grossly offensive or indecent in person? Why can't the normal tools people always use in social interaction handle this?
> Shouting abuse at someone in public
Is not what the person who was arrested in this case was doing. His tweet was not directed at any particular person.
The law does recognize assault as a crime, and shouting abuse at someone in public can rise to the level of assault if the person being shouted at could reasonably believe that the shouter was threatening actual harm. But the crime in this case is not speech; the shouting isn't a crime because it is expressing an offensive opinion. It's a crime because it's a threat of actual harm.
What other institution would do this instead of the government? Because having no form of regulation is in my opinion not viable.
Just think of it for a second. No regulation is a double edge knife. Yes, maybe it would make for a less repressive society, but you would be opening ways for any sort of expression, not only those that don't bother you directly but also those that do. So lacking a better option, the government fills this gap.
If that is not acceptable to you, you should come up with alternatives other than unlimited freedom.
Yep, I get all kinds of really mean things said to me. Sometimes I even get upset by them.
I don't feel a need to arrest and jail the people saying those mean things.
What, precisely, do you mean here?
So we don't like repression, so we use repression? That doesn't make sense.
The way to counter speech that promotes ideologies you think are bad is with more speech that explains why those ideologies are bad ones. Or even just reminds people that those ideologies are bad ones. It isn't to adopt the same techniques that those bad ideologies use.
> What other institution would do this instead of the government?
The obvious other way of regulating speech that some people find offensive or indecent is people's freedom of choice in social interaction. Don't interact with people who say things you find offensive or indecent. If the offensive or indecent things are in tweets, don't follow them on Twitter.
> having no form of regulation is in my opinion not viable.
There is no such thing as "no form of regulation". People already regulate their social interactions with other people. Adding government micromanagement on top of that does not really add any value. It just adds more ways for the government to mess with people.
The idea underlying government regulation of speech seems to be that people should be protected from things that they might find offensive or indecent, because people are delicate snowflakes that can be damaged by such things and they aren't capable of just dealing with them using the normal tools of social interaction. For mature adults that idea is laughable. Part of being a mature adult is understanding that there are lots of things in the world that are not the way you would like them to be and dealing with it, and not invoking Higher Authority every time you don't like something.
Why doesn't it? I can see the irony of course but that doesn't automatically explain it. If the boundaries of a tolerant society are clearly defined, any form of repression towards emergent intolerant ideologies outside the scope of such society are valid and won't jeopardize it because of such scope.
> The way to counter speech that promotes ideologies you think are bad is with more speech that explains why those ideologies are bad ones.
That process is viable long term but not enough to protect people that might be in iminent danger, today, from groups like neo-nazis, racists or anti-lgbtq+. Society must account for that and protect those in iminent danger.
> Don't interact with people who say things you find offensive or indecent.
What about persecution? People that you try to get away from but will go out of their way to hurt you? That is again not enough, and if government resorts only to that it will expose vulnerable groups to hazard.
> There is no such thing as "no form of regulation". People already regulate their social interactions with other people. Adding government micromanagement on top of that does not really add any value. It just adds more ways for the government to mess with people.
That works on a micro-social scale, but not on a global scale, which is the kind of isonomy that is required for a functioning society. Government individuals can and have abused power, but I think those are two different issues, one being the scope of government action and the second power misuse and mismanagement. The later can happen even without a wider form of the former through corrupt operations. That is, even if we limit the scope of operation, if we don't elect good officials, they can still abuse power beyond this limited scope of action.
> damaged by such things and they aren't capable of just dealing with them using the normal tools of social interaction. For mature adults that idea is laughable.
That is a superiority fallacy that only distracts from the issue. Is *everyone* complaining about this a snowflake? Isn't there a slight possibility they might have some form os substance to their claims? If there is a small chance somebody is in distress we have to make sure we take this seriously. Sure you understand as a mature adult like yourself we are not talking about isolated incidents but actions that can be taken by society as a whole.
Our system of common law already does that. As I noted in response to another poster downthread, assault is already a crime, and shouting abuse at a particular person is assault if that person can reasonably believe that they are in danger of actual harm from the shouter. But that is not what the person who was arrested in the subject article was doing. He was not threatening, or even talking to, any particular person.
> people that might be in iminent danger, today, from groups like neo-nazis, racists or anti-lgbtq+
Whatever "imminent danger" exists is not from tweets. And conflating a tweet with the kind of "imminent danger" that actually harms people is exactly the kind of muddying of the "boundaries of a tolerant society" that makes the problem worse, not better.
> What about persecution?
The man who got arrested in the subject article was not persecuting anybody.
> Government individuals can and have abused power, but I think those are two different issues, one being the scope of government action and the second power misuse and mismanagement.
Expanding the scope of government power also expands the scope of possible misuse and mismanagement. So the two are connected.
> Isn't there a slight possibility they might have some form os substance to their claims?
Saying that you are offended by someone's tweet is one thing; of course you can and should say that. That's exactly the kind of thing I'm advocating for--combating offensive speech with more speech.
But calling the police because you are offended by someone's tweet is very different. Now you're not fighting speech with more speech; you're fighting speech with persecution. Which is exactly the sort of thing you claim to be against.
> we are not talking about isolated incidents but actions that can be taken by society as a whole.
Um, what? The tweet that got this man arrested was an isolated incident. He's not "society as a whole". He's just one person who tweeted something.
In fact, what "society as a whole" does, on your preferred model, is far more like persecution and "imminent danger" than what this man did. The guy tweets something you find offensive, so you bring down the massive power of the government on him? For a tweet? Where is your sense of proportion? Why can't you just say "that was offensive" and leave it at that, and save the massive power of the government for the cases where there is actual harm? Wasting all that power on a guy that just tweets something makes it harder to focus that power on the cases where people actually are harmed, which is where you say it needs to be used.
The specific arrest case blinds any sensible attempt to have a mature conversation over this subject.
In my honest opinion, the bloke who is obviously not a snowflake, that posted a frigging swastika made from lbgtq+ flags should just suck it as a real man and just go to jail without complaining like a wimp, otherwise he would be himself a snowflake and wouldn't be posting that. (Or have I got that wrong? I am not quite sure anymore).
In any case, adults should be behaving more like adults and realise their actions have consequences other than not having Christmas presents.
Have you got complaints? Good, we live in a democratic society. Just vote better next time. Just enjoy it while it lasts because that is the very thing that is just gone the moment that so called minor tweet repost swastika gets in effect.
And sorry for any inconvenience. Hope I didn't upset you.
In other words, you're perfectly ok with persecuting some people, so it's not persecution you have a problem with, just persecution of people you feel shouldn't be persecuted. Got it.
> adults should be behaving more like adults and realise their actions have consequences other than not having Christmas presents.
Certainly. I have already said, multiple times now in this thread (though not all in response to you), that this bloke should certainly expect consequences such as other people saying how much of an asshole he is. But that doesn't mean he should go to jail.
> Just enjoy it while it lasts because that is the very thing that is just gone the moment that so called minor tweet repost swastika gets in effect.
So you honestly think that if this guy isn't arrested and jailed for his tweet, it's the start of a slippery slope to a new Nazi society? You appear to be ignorant of how the actual Nazis came to power. Hint: it wasn't by saying things that were offensive and having people just shrug and go about their business and not arresting them.
The UK's elected parliament is free to repeal or amend the law at any time - it has chosen not to.
If this is a matter that concerns the electorate, they can ask their MP to raise the point in parliament.
If the way you determine what fits this description is by knowing it when you see it, you're enforcing ideology. There is no way that you need to interview a person to figure out whether a communication is illegal. You're interviewing the person to see if the person is illegal.
edit: https://www.college.police.uk/article/protecting-freedom-exp...
Just because something is codified in law doesn't make it right.
Can you honestly not think of any "offensive" tweets that you think would constitute harrassment and benefit from someone telling you to get your shit together? (edit: by which I mean police attention).
e.g. "I hope your {{family member}} gets {{offensive act}}'d"
Replace with favourite family member, and most offensive act you can think of.
Such a law used to exist in the U.S. as well. It was ruled unconstitutional, because the U.S. actually has meaningful protections for free speech (or 'freeze peach', as it's also sometimes known). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Communications_Decency_Act : "...[I]t attempted to regulate both indecency (when available to children) and obscenity in cyberspace".
I believe that the original tweet by Laurence Fox did not receive a police response, and neither did the likely thousands of retweets.
The police grossly overreacted. Even their PCC criticised them and everyone seems to agree that no crime was committed (well, apart from a fringe who were the actual target of the original tweet).
The receiver is also important here. The same text can be innocuous in adult to adult communication but worrying if sent to a minor, specially if spammed repeatedly to somebody living at the same street.
I can see several cases in what the interview would be a reasonable first approach.
In any case it feels like the societies are slowly waking-up to the dangers of ciberwar; and that the age of puppet masters being allowed to roam free, brainwash and destroy the lives of people online is dying for good.
Police overreacted. No need to try yo find justifications.
... in your opinion. In many (most?) places Police has the right to ask informally anybody when investigating a situation of concern. People have a different way to interact with Police in Europe than in US when the excuse to "lie to the police" can't be used as mass destruction weapon against you. (If he was really arrested) he had to behave like a moron to escalate the situation to the point of being arrested.
And what he was expecting? Police are really motivated to investigate anything related with hate crime online now, after seeing in the last years how efficient became the pupetry. We only need to remind how the Qanon movement started (and ended), or how very young and very naive adolescents in the western countries had been radicalized to join the Islamic State.
Considering that the arrest caused an outrage, that no charges were brought, and that even the force's Commissioner criticised the action, I think that it is established.
Obviously the latter, therefore the content itself is held to some standard. Show me that standard, and I'll show you an ideology.
Not obvious at all. If you can explain to the cops why you found it offensive, it's conceivable to me that I'd be interviewed about it
The idea that the police can have the authority to detain someone because they have a reasonable belief that they hurt someone else's feelings is... well, if y'all don't see the obvious problem with that, I'm not sure how else to explain it.
Would this opinion change if you learned that in the UK people are generally trusted to make correct and true police crime reports?
Say you lived in a place where actually 100% of reports to the police, were truly people who felt like a crime had taken place. In that case, wouldn't we be fine with cops following up all reports?
So if people in the UK generally trust each other to be making true reports when they feel like a crime has taken place....why wouldn't brits empower the police to follow up on serious reports?
No, not at all, because "generally trusted" is not "100% of the time people will do things in good faith". And I don't agree with your assessment in any case; the article in question is a clear counter-example. And another comment somewhere here claims that the UK deals with quite a large amount of these sorts of reports where the police investigate and decide there's nothing to pursue.
> Say you lived in a place where actually 100% of reports to the police, were truly people who felt like a crime had taken place. In that case, wouldn't we be fine with cops following up all reports?
That depends on what you mean by "following-up". If tweeting something that made someone "anxious" means that you can expect the police to show up at your door and demand to interview you (or else you will be arrested), I think that's incredibly heavy-handed. In this case, the police should have been able to look at the tweet in question, think "hmm, well, that's a shitty thing to post, but I don't see anything criminal here", and leave it at that.
> So if people in the UK generally trust each other to be making true reports when they feel like a crime has taken place....why wouldn't brits empower the police to follow up on serious reports?
I've already pointed out that I don't believe this is true in general, but there's more to it than that. People change. Governments change. The law often does not. If you give one government the power to do something, because you believe that government is good and will not abuse it, you must consider that the next government may not be one that you trust as much, but will also get to have that power.
Is it conceivable that the UK government would actually interview you to protect me against itself?
Selective enforcement of unenforceable rules is a century-old trick. Here's a relevant quote from Atlas Shrugged:
You fellows were pikers, but we know the real trick, and you'd better get wise to it. There's no way to rule innocent men. The only power any government has is the power to crack down on criminals. Well, when there aren't enough criminals, one makes them. One declares so many things to be a crime that it becomes impossible for men to live without breaking laws. Who wants a nation of law-abiding citizens? What's there in that for anyone? But just pass the kind of laws that can neither be observed nor enforced nor objectively interpreted—and you create a nation of law-breakers—and then you cash in on guilt.
Yes I absolutely do. Do you have some examples of the opposite to share?
edit: Assuming the parent means that they think 'left' offensive tweets would equally dealt with by the Police.
I'm from the UK (Scotland) and I cant remember a 'pro left' offensive tweeter getting arrested, but then again the number of arrests for social media posts is pretty damn small in the first place, so not exactly something I think ANYONE can reliably draw inferences from.
I think the most recent was Toby Child (Correction, Toby Shone), but there was a Walker something arrested for owning "the Anarchist cookbook" in the last 10 years, and more recently multiple members of extinction Rebellion were arrested juuust before an authorized protest, on no ground, for no particular reason, which -what a surprise- prevented them to assist the protest (This is actually a French tactic, good job implementing it UK police).
It really picked in the 90s against "ecoterrorists", but arresting lefties is like 50% of your counterterrorist police job, because they smoke pot and like to trespass a lot, which give ground to search their home and arrest them for cannabis possession (or fuck with them, just because) and way less dangerous than going against real terrorists with guns and explosives.
What i find really weird is people complaining "It's always against my camp", forgetting that most of the time, it's actually not.
I get that UK law is different from US law, and that they actually have hate speech laws (while, in the US, hate speech is protected by the first amendment). But it's really bad that governments have this sort of power, where they can persecute people based on speech they don't like.
To clarify, I don't agree with the law - I think offensive speech should be legal - but this Ayn Rand stuff just sounds petulant in this context. If you want to insult gays on social media as a hobby, the main thing stopping you is not government oppression, it's the fact that a majority of voters want you to not do that.
Do you really think that a majority of voters would want somebody to be arrested for a post like this? If we're going to automatically assume that all government actions are simply what the "majority of voters" wanted, then nothing the government does can ever be wrong.
And the reason I think that is, making fun of gays used to be both widely accepted and totally legal, and those two things changed at roughly the same time. If that's not the law changing to reflect the evolving will of the electorate, it's a hell of a coincidence.
Actually, we don't have to imagine this.
First they came for the bloke that posted bad taste jokes about a murder victim, and he got 12 weeks in jail [1]
Then they came for the man who insulted a policeman by sharing a Snapchat picture of his face with a penis superimposed on it, and he was fined £400 and required to do a community service punishment [2]
Then they came for the people who direspected military dead by burning poppies and they got nights in cells and fines and hastily organised commemorative apologies [3]
Then they came for the bloke that tweeted something about tEh LGBT AgEnDA, he got off relatively lightly and the police got their wrists slapped, and people started quoting Ayn Rand and talking about how uniquely oppressive "woke" people are
[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-lancashire-19869710 [2] https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2552269/Builder-ord... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/uk/2012/nov/12/kent-man-arrested...
The first level is that many western societies have vocal groups of people whose joy in life comes from bullying others (getting other people fired, targeting them with rather disproportionate punishments, campaigning outside their houses, etc). The woke/progressive movement has attracted a lot of these people, but I agree that blaming all progressives for doing that is like blaming all conservatives for being racist.
The second level is that the governments realized that by giving platform to bullies they can keep the public busy with an endless third-world-style feud, while escaping accountability for many real problems (former middle class plunging into poverty).
The third level is that most people refuse to scrutinize the actions of those who claim to be fighting for a good cause, refuse to check for conflicts of interest, refuse to distinguish between anti-discrimination and attention seeking and refuse to focus on actions rather than identities. And this makes the 2 previous levels possible.
That would be the less foreign thing to me
Did a judge sign off on a warrant for his arrest? If I find your post grossly offensive should you be removed from your home and sent to a police interrogation room just in case you hurt my feelings? And how would the police be able to determine that outside a court? My feelings would have to be litigated which would require my filing suit. Any suit originating from a civilian is civil in its nature and is outside the scope of police action.
Edit: Let me caveat because I fired fast and loose with this reply. This is from an American perspective. I am not a UK lawyer so this could very well be perfectly legal. Though I do view it as "bad" and would oppose the introduction of these norms in America.
This section covers it:
I'm not sure of the specifics as to what "public decency" means in the UK but I believe your implication. I think subsection 6 supports my 'theory' (read: wild accusation)? Seeing as it was posted on the internet and could reasonably be avoided.
Even if that's not so, this seems like a tort and should not be handled by the police. Just my opinion.
The tweet was neither of those though?
Tell the complainant, sorry, you feel like you're a victim of crime
Do people in the UK really wake up every day knowing that hurting someone's feelings is a crime and they're just ok with that? Of course society could not function if that were the case in practice. In practice, whose feelings matter is entirely political.
Focus on solving crimes like theft, not investigating meme retweets.
Why would they even need to interview him to determine if it was a crime or not?
It is a crime in the UK to send a malicious message contrary to that Act of parliament...
> Why would they even need to interview him to determine if it was a crime or not?
Lots of reasons to interview him, and you've given one here. Generally in UK, if someone complains that you've broken the law, you're given an interview to present your side of the matter.
> it sounds like he wasn't willing to come voluntarily to the interview room.
Is this against the law in the UK?
The police also have wide discretionary powers to arrest without warrant. One of those grounds is to allow "prompt and effective" investigation of a suspected offence. And PACE Code of Practice G expressly suggests "won't come to be interviewed unless arrested" is one case when this might apply.
So, in practice, if you refuse the 'voluntary' interview then you may well face a compulsory one, plus a bonus arrest record.
In principle they shouldn't be arresting you unless they have sufficient grounds for suspecting an offence, though there are the usual accountability problems in enforcing that. The recent case of ST is a good illustration of that[0]: a 14-year old was arrested at dawn on a flimsy case of participating in the robbery of a mobile phone at school. The arrest was mostly to search his room, as well as to ensure attendance at interview, which is legal under PACE, but he was willing to attend voluntarily, as well as to agree to the search, and the timing of arrest and decision to hold in custody rather than immediately bail were also probably unlawful. He sued for false imprisonment. He lost the case because the first instance judge decided that 'whilst the arrest and detention were "reprehensible", the way the police powers had been exercised "lamentable" and it was doubtful that the actions would be "justified in the court of public opinion", there had nevertheless been reasonable grounds to suspect the Appellant of an offence of robbery and there had been reasonable grounds to believe that the arrest and detention were necessary.'
(This was overturned on appeal to the High Court, but it does show what a high bar there is for holding to account the use of powers of arrest).
Being the victim of a crime is a different thing than having the feeling of being the victim of a crime.
See the other replies to this comment for examples of this.
>Bad law is political ideology disguised as law. When we see police officers marching with demonstrators and waving political flags and chanting activist slogans - that is bad law.
>Our Equality Act 2010 is bad law, because it does not treat all people equally and can be interpreted in such a way as to discriminate against people with certain views or beliefs.
One of the people they feature on their website as oppressed by "Bad Law" is Calvin Robinson, who has this to say on twitter:
>“No LGB without T” is a highly political statement. What does a mental health issue have to do with sexuality?
>The trans movement is discriminatory towards women’s rights and female-only spaces.
>Anime is degenerate. There’s a reason most trans activists use anime avatars.
As far as I can tell it's an anti LGBT organization, and focuses on legal defense of people who engage in hate speech, and the repeal of anti discrimination laws.
Whether or not an arrest is warranted is another debate, but the it's important to highlight the context of the group who made the image to understand their motivations behind creating the image, and what it implies about people who share the image.
Make of that what you will.
I can’t find evidence of this, and the LGBA website says their primary funding comes from individual donations.
https://staging.lesbianandgaynews.com/2021/10/gary-powell-wh...
The above article makes this point:
Why would it donate to an organisation that campaigns for lesbian, gay and bisexual rights, that has an overwhelmingly left-wing membership, and that was founded by two left-wing lesbian feminists?
- given the LGBA’s position is:
“(W)e do not, and will not, forge links with, or accept funding from, any organisation… that seeks to undermine women’s reproductive rights.”
- which the Heritage Foundation oppose, I gather.
I’m inclined to believe the Heritage Foundation link is a untruth, to be honest. Given the LGBA’s charitable status I guess we’ll get definitive evidence at some point.
I think being such a niche cause that only your notional political enemies pursuing a divide and conquer strategy will work with you internationally is what most people mean when they accuse a cause of being "astroturfed"
[For the avoidance of doubt I fully agree that in other respects, they do not share the same political views and that they are not closet hardline antifeminists in disguise]
No it is not. Please don't spread mistruths.
> and are widely regarded in the UK as a thinly disguised hate group
I doubt that most people in the UK have heard of this charity. Also this is a very disingenuous view of their aims.
That's not dishonest, that's a strategic show of strength.
I'm not LGBT, but I do personally know LGB people who don't like the Ts being lumped in with them. They aren't anti-trans by any means, but they see it as a different thing that tends to distract from the LGB and causes more strife. I also know LGB people who share your philosophy and are perfectly happy to have the Ts onboard.
I'm just explaining my POV as an outsider.
This particular group was formed to combat the notion of LGBT identity. So it isn't unreasonable to class it as anti-LGBT, in addition to also holding more specifically anti-T positions.
The answer is, of course, that "we" don't lump them together; the group as a whole has decided to band together because the persecution and opression they suffer is in many ways shared, and often the kind of person who would persecute one of the groups would persecute all of them. But it's not "anti-trans" or "anti-LGBT" to ask this question.
(Consider "Asian-American", which is more a political/activist construct than anything else, given that "Asian" describes a bunch of different groups, some of which may not have all that much in common culturally or even politically.)
The organization in question may also be anti-trans (or anti-LGBT as a whole), but that's... a separate issue?
https://www.badlawproject.com/cases
They highlight a case with Amy Gallahger, who is an adamant "anti-CRT" activist per her Twitter.
So it seems they were focused on other things, but have pivoted to anti-trans activism(hence the amount of Pride imagery on their front page).
Tactically it makes sense. They are following the lead of other such organizations by focusing on anti-trans rhetoric, as it is currently more palatable, before pivoting back to marginalizing other minorities.
[citation needed]
It’s a tricky read, but a gist might be that most Brits are generally well-meaning, fairly uninformed, and tend to be conservative when asked questions about specific scenarios:
“Recognition: most Britons say that people should be able to change their social gender, but are split on whether they should be able to change their legal gender”
“Process: Britons oppose making it easier to legally change gender“
“Access to sport: Britons oppose transgender athletes taking part in sporting events for their new gender”
“Access to treatment: Britons are split on the NHS providing hormone therapy for trans people, and tend to oppose it providing gender reassignment surgery”
No it's not, it's literally not relevant (or at least shouldn't be). You are saying a person's political beliefs are legally relevant to if they should be arrested or not.
In other western democracies, freedom of speech isn't paramount. What you say matters and you can be held responsible for it and the harm you cause. I'm not taking one side or the other, personally, but this is an opinion question settled by the voters.
I understand, but that's not what you said in GP.
The comment was giving context around why the guy's actions might be considered morally reprehensible (or more simply, "wrong"), and was not in any way suggesting that that made an arrest justified. In fact the text explicitly says that this is not the point being made.
If the reader makes that leap (here despite the comment author's warning), then that's on the reader, and it's exactly why charitable interpretation is important. Without charitable interpretation, people put words in each others' mouths, talk past each other, or don't hear each other.
It's essential to civil discourse in general: most of what most people write or say will be less than perfect, so productive two-way communication requires making constant active effort to forgive any perceived allusion, subtext or sleight, to the point of unreasonableness. So no, it's not disingenuous at all to bring this up. (But isn't doing this exhausting? My goodness is it ever! Yes.)
Note, crucially, that a "charitable interpretation" is not necessarily the "most likely interpretation" or "the interpretation you believe is the most accurate". It is the interpretation that puts the other person in the most favourable light, while remaining mostly (yes, this often requires flexibility and some approximation) logically consistent with what was actually said or written. In this particular case, a charitable interpretation can be made by simply not putting words in the author's mouth: his text is entirely consistent with the charitable interpretation.
> In fact the text explicitly says that this is not the point being made.
I don't think it's fair to prime someone with a bunch of negative information, and then turn around and say "no, no! I'm not trying to prejudice your thinking at all!"
To me, I think all this context was entirely unnecessary. This article is able police excess -- or, really, legal excess. I would much rather have a discussion about whether or not the sorts of laws that lead to arrests like this are reasonable and acceptable in a free society. Instead -- and I agree that doing this is exhausting! -- we are not only muddying the waters by giving people an excuse to say "yeah, but this person deserved it because they are anti-trans", but we are going into a meta-meta discussion about whether or not someone meant to muddy the waters or not. Which, IMO, is entirely irrelevant: the waters have been muddied, and this entire subthread is a stupid waste of time, time that I regret wasting (but, given who I am, I know I will waste again sometime in the future).
To me, the point is not "this guy said some stuff that muddied the waters, but he didn't intend to muddy the waters, so it's ok". The point is that the waters have been muddied with irrelevant context, and instead of having an interesting discussion about freedom of speech, we're talking about how shitty an anti-trans group is. Which, ok, sure, this group does indeed seem pretty shitty, but I don't come to HN because I want to get into a mood where need to yet again get pissed at shitty transphobic people.
> so productive two-way communication requires making constant active effort to forgive any perceived allusion, subtext or sleight, to the point of unreasonableness.
This two-way communication is a two-way street. We should not put all of the burden on the reader. The author should have a responsibility to be as clear as possible, and avoid posting things that are guaranteed to throw a discussion off-topic.
"The relevant question is not whether this person did something reprehensible or wrong or even harmful, but rather whether the police's actions were proportional, or whether there was a legal basis for an arrest... Or even whether the current legal framework is how it ought to be."
The goal in the above paragraph is to:
- neutralize any unfair rhetorical impact of the parent comment
- allow for the parent comment to be read charitably
- argue directly to the relevance of the point, and help refocus or reframe the discussion
Now query whether I'd be successful at any of this... But I think that's how I would approach it!
You ask for a charitable interpretation of OP, but don't give a charitable interpretation of the response.
To demonstrate, even if OP didn't mean to imply the interpretation as everyone sees it, it's highly upvoted and natural to interpret it as such.
The fact that it's upvoted demonstrates that many people do agree with the perspective of that interpretation. In other words, even if the interpretation is not correct (a very dubious claim), it's clearly a popular perspective. Yet you're not willing to engage with it.
The popularity of a comment does not change its meaning.
---
[1] In fact, I would like to point out that the alternative criticism I have just proposed (the one on which you are commenting) is essentially the same one you yourself made here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32428259
It would appear we're actually of the same opinion on the substance of the parent comment, so I'm not sure where you're coming from here. Is it at all possible that you may have projected a little bit?
The fact a fairly minor inconvenience was suffered to somebody with a pretty sick ideology certainly means I wont be clutching my pearls. Im sure the government did 1000 worse things happened today that didnt catch the attention of the editor of the mirror.
This feels like Martin Niemöller's poem, personified. I agree that this guy has a pretty sick ideology, but what if one of us posted something snarky/disrespectful about, say, pedophile religious leaders, and someone got offended, claiming we were being disrespectful toward their religion? I doubt you'd be so calmly dismissive of an arrest in this case, even if it was a "fairly minor inconvenience".
I know UK law is different, but at least in the US, just the fact that you have been arrested, even if no charges are ever filed, can cause you problems down the road. Just last week I was applying to renew my Global Entry subscription (for non-Americans who may not be familiar, it's a lame-I-have-to-do-this-yet-useful program to streamline re-entry into the US after traveling abroad), and there was a question that specifically asked if I had ever been arrested, even if the record for such an arrest had been expunged or sealed. Fortunately I was able to truthfully answer "no" to that, but had I been caught up in something ridiculous like the article describes, I would have had to answer "yes", and possibly be denied a useful government service.
You might also consider that a "minor inconvenience", but I'm sure there are more severe examples where merely having a no-charges-filed arrest on your record can have some dystopian consequences for a person.
> Im sure the government did 1000 worse things happened today that didnt catch the attention of the editor of the mirror.
That's just whataboutism. So we shouldn't care about what are perhaps minor abuses, just because there are worse abuses?
If you tweet or retweet Nazi propaganda or holocaust denial material and live here in Austria then you may be prosecuted. I’m not a super fan of these restrictions on free speech but I do note that I live in a place where there are a few and they are important to us here.
Edit: There is some amusing irony to being downvoted for this reply which only states my own personal interest in hearing some information from someone and doesn’t tell anyone else what to think ;)
Being downvoted is not equal to government prosecution. You can be told people don't like your opinion and just say so, compared to having police knock on your door over it. I don't agree with what the guy from the article is advocating, but I do agree that he should not be prosecuted/arrested for what he did.
Isn't the idea that the intent behind actions being legally relevant pretty well established? There's a difference between different degrees of murder and between murder and manslaughter based not on whether the actions themselves differed, but whether the intent to kill was there (and not even that, but how _long_ it was held, e.g. "spur of the moment" versus premeditated). It seems like in any case where intent is relevant, looking at the context of the accused would be necessary to determine the scope of the crime.
But we're not talking about murder, we're talking about a social media post that "caused someone anxiety." Whether intent matters for other (actual) crimes is irrelevant.
Being a German, I tend to agree.
There is such a thing as being beyond the pale.
....In fact, Wiktionary states [0] "According to the Oxford English Dictionary, there is insufficient evidence that the term originally referred to the English Pale, the part of Ireland directly under the control of the English government in the Late Middle Ages".
That kind of sentiment makes this whole "trans nazis are infiltrating and controlling the cis lesbian and gay rights movement" accusation a little scarier, in my opinion, due to context - portraying your ideological opponents as nazis as prelude to violence, and trans people are already the target of plenty of violent transphobic attacks.
(I still don't think this arrest is warranted, absent some sort of other evidence that he intends to do more than call people names online... but there are very specific connotations to calling trans people nazis, that I feel like it's fair to call out aside from mere 'political beliefs')
There is not now and likely never will be a politician who has not at some point compared their adversaries to Nazis. Do we put them all behind bars, or only the ones you disagree with?
What do we do with the trans activist comparing those who oppose them with Nazis?
https://calgaryherald.com/news/local-news/planned-drag-night...
Distasteful memes are not.
Top notch sarcasm or stereotypical "America best ever, every other country sucks". I guess it's funny either way.
If it was that easy to move to the US, I’d be on the next plane to Miami.
They have helped defend some feminists. Again, you can disagree with their defense of those people - but that isn't exactly mustache twirling evil.
Society isn't supposed to be where one political faction throws it's opposers into prison.
This organization has a peculiar pattern, much of which revolves around attacking the Equality Act, which tries to protect people based on:
"Age, Disability, Gender reassignment, Marriage and civil partnership, Race, Religion or belief, Sex, Sexual orientation"
With that laid bare, I guess their pattern isn't so peculiar, huh.
This isn't "politics", it is simply about suppressing minorities.
Is it really? Someone retweeted something, that's controversial but not illegal and got arrested. The context does not clarify anything but divides.
I don't want to be arrested for pro-trans tweets either, but if people get arrested for speaking their minds that's the pathway to fascism.
And that's the thing. I'm sure there are plenty of people (probably even the guy who was arrested in the article) who could claim a pro-trans tweet "caused them anxiety", and get someone arrested, or at least subject to a required police interview, which isn't much better. I am dumbfounded that people seem to think this situation is ok, and the UK law in question is sane.
It was not in good taste but I think it highlights an actual issue and it's too easy (and perhaps even proves the point) to accuse anyone sharing it or not being overly outraged by it of being 'anti LGBT'. Like JK Rowling being cancelled for saying that women may not feel safe in toilets with men (many women agree), for instance.
Also noteworthy that the UK has had "Malicious Communications" laws on the statute book since 1988 and actually jailed people for it, so the position that this is some new level of outrage perpetrated by the Woke Agenda because the person spoken to by police was a homophobe rather than a poppy burner isn't really one in favour of free speech per se...
It is NOT noteworthy. The solution to bad speech is MORE speech, not authoritarian crackdowns based on how someone had hurt feelings. Better points of view will prevail.
A system where it’s okay to arrest someone for causing “distress” is one that will 100% be abused.
That your comment conflates the two is everything that worries me about speech policing.
In the long run, bad precedents have a way of inevitably being turned against everyone, especially the most vulnerable.
"Let's not discuss a specific action and its implications on the society. Let's instead talk how bad the person is because he retweeted a post that was created by another person that expresses the views that some people decided nobody should dare to express."
No, separation of actions from identities is a cornerstone of a civilized society. Otherwise, we quickly descend into witch burning and lynching by the mob.
> The Equality Act 2010 says you mustn’t be discriminated against because of your religion or belief.
> A philosophical belief is a non-religious belief and includes things like humanism, secularism and atheism.
> Something can be a philosophical belief if you strongly and genuinely believe in it and it concerns an important aspect of human life and behaviour. The courts have said that the belief in man-made climate change and spiritualism are philosophical beliefs. But a political belief is not a philosophical belief.
0 https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/law-and-courts/discriminat...
Specific to Northern Ireland:
> It is against the law for an employer to discriminate against you because of your religious or similar philosophical beliefs or political opinions.
> However, a political opinion which includes approval or acceptance of the use of violence for political purposes in Northern Ireland is excluded from protection.
1 https://www.nidirect.gov.uk/articles/religious-belief-and-po...
There's an odd mindset around this sort of thing in some internet circles, in which for example a book that contains a fictional evil person is assumed to be the same thing as an evil book, almost by definition. Isn't that part of what people are reacting to when they are outraged when this sort of arrest happens?
which book specifically are you thinking of here? was this a thing I missed?
It implies nothing though. Or are you saying before hitting retweet or before passing along a meme that everyone now needs to do hours of research trying to trace back the origin of a meme to determine its source and how that source relates to politics and wokeness? Does that really seem reasonable to you?
Well actually No. Its not important, not at all. If it’s not illegal to cross the street, it doesn’t suddenly become illegal to cross the street because you’re crossing to get to a nazi meet up.
This whole “yes we are abusing the laws to oppress people with opinions we disagree with… But just look at how disagreeable they are!!” Is dangerous.
Examples: you're not allowed peanuts on a plane if someone has an allergy; almost all meat on sale is halal etc.
People are far too willing to take significant risks just to get emotional gratification and appease their own outrage. Usually it's delivered with a blind trust in the system (the sort of trust you'd normally never hear re the police), that it will somehow be used mostly for good, the scope won't expand indefinitely, and the false positives are just a cost of doing business.
I like Andrew Doyle quote on this:
> In this new woke era, our law enforcement agencies are not content to police crime, but also non-crime. This is a huge relief, because for a long while now too many citizens have been not breaking the law and getting away with it.
But I'm not sure why GBNews would be grifting with it. Conservatives have been in power in the UK for 12 years now and they've done nothing about it.
I just think it's worth rebutting, that the police are not combing twitter for anything borderline.
These are complaints that the public are making to the police. There is a relevant law about malicious comms, so the police are obliged to open a case.
> this new woke era
Give me a break. Members of the public are taxed to provide a police service. If they feel like they're a victim of malicious communications, they're allowed to go to the police. Nothing to do with being "content to police non-crime" or being "woke".
>Give me a break. Members of the public are taxed to provide a police service. If they feel like they're a victim of malicious communications, they're allowed to go to the police. Nothing to do with being "content to police non-crime" or being "woke".
And you act as though that's a good thing?
100k people going through the work of reporting what is likely mostly unfunny boomer memes and thinly veiled trolling is a much stronger indictment of the current state of affairs than 100k instances of bored cops going looking for violations of some broad law from the comfort of their desks.
The radicalization that happens in circles like the one that image comes from, in addition to or instead of the one (I hope) you mean, is not one against undemocratic practices, abuse of power etc. It is one against people who are trans (or queer in general). And that radicalization does harm. It leads to shame and discrimination. It leads to violence. And yes, it _kills_.
Please make sure you (and others) know what radicalization you mean, and make sure that the one that is happening is correct.
"Well obviously pedophiles are bad. You wouldn't defend a pedophile! Unless.. you are a pedophile?"
Of course you are going to label your opponent in unfavorable terms. But here's the thing - why do you need to?
If your opponent is actually a murderer, you don't need to talk them up as a Sig Heiling murderer who hates gay people. You can just be truthful and call them a murderer.
If the only offense you have is to slander your opponent... you might be making up the outrage.
Clearly the meme was not pro-Nazi.
What was the meme.
Context is key to understanding complex thoughts, even ugly bigoted ones, I'm concerned that you aren't including it. Lawrence Fox is not an LGBT ally in any way, and his tweet and the retweet of this news story were not funny, they were attacks.
'Haha so funny, it's not pro-Nazi, it's just saying other people are Nazis.'
Ah yes, classic strategies never die.
> Hampshire Constabulary said, after initially visiting the property, officers agreed to return on Thursday.
> When they returned they were prevented from entering so arrested the 51-year-old suspect so they could interview him about the alleged offence.
> He has since been released and will face no further action.
If there's a report, they have a duty to go interview the person, and usually its closed as NFA.
In this case, he arranged for a voluntary interview (which would have leas to NFA), then reneged, which creates the conditions under PACE that necessitate an arrest so interview can be done quickly.
All of which would have been explained to him.
He wanted to get arrested, or had a room temperature IQ. Or both.
As for him wanting to be arrested. So what? He was trying to prove a point that the trans ideology is authoritarian and the police obliged.
The way UK law works can be a bit funny. Not in a good way.
Seeing as most people, including the force's PCC, agree that he should not have been arrested at all, he may have a good shot at it.
Being released is better than what it could’ve been. The fact he was visited at all is terrifying.
It's funny because on one side the UK is the birthplace of most of how democracies work today, and the oldest continuously running democratic parliament. So it has fairly good credentials.
But on the other hand this system is so dangerous, there is only really one chamber (the other one has no power), no counterpower, no constitution (the precendents thing is a joke, given that they are free to make up their own precedents on the fly), it is free to basically vote whatever it wants with a 50% and 1 vote majority, and that includes wiping out any civil liberty they feel like.
Again hard to call "unstable" a system that has shown to be so stable for so long, but it feels that it is not stable by design.
This sort of policing of offensive content on social media among democracies is basically just the UK + the middle east.
I can't think of any other non-despotic countries dumb enough to do this?
They went over by arrangement with him for a voluntary interview, the guy decided to be an arse about it, which created the conditions under PACE (Policing and Crime Act) that necessitate arrest.
Arrest occurs, mans fucking shocked.
Play stupid games...
Now I will say, the Mal Comms laws are a disaster. But Jesus Christ the Mirror misrepresents this by a mile.
Voluntary interview doesn't seem so voluntary if you can't refuse it (or, rescind the voluntary acceptance of interview) without the refusal becoming a condition for a non-voluntary interview.
They could arrest you to interview, but its agreed they won't.
If you decide to not bother doing the voluntary interview, arrest becomes necessary, and you get arrested.
Arrests can show up on enhanced DBS checks, and are a real pain in the hole to explain to employers down the line. Hence there being a non arrest option.
What doesn't make sense is calling that "voluntary", because it clearly isn't voluntary when the other option is be arrested.
Its a somewhat confusing term, but that's what they call it.
Usually its made clear to you at the time which of those cases its going to be.
"Look, you can come in for an interview at a time that suits both of us, or we will have to go and get you at a time that suits us. Either way, you will be interviewed."
So you're fine that they "could arrest him, but won't" for a retweet of a stupid meme?
Who cares by what laws or twisted logic they justify it.
I disagree with that law itself for a number of reasons (its fucking daft), but the correct procedure was followed here.
If interviewing is required then what is to stop somebody from reporting somebody everyday and requiring the police to go out consistently?
I'm none of the above (thank god).
The police hand it over, is why.
Not just anyone can request a DBS check, but many jobs require one.
A "voluntary interview" may or may not come with the alternative of arrest.
In this particular case, it did.
In some cases, it doesn't.
A voluntary interview may also lead to arrest (eg: if you admit to a crime, they usually arrest you to charge you).
Laws on controversial topics often have awkward corner cases, and one strategy to fight them is to force those corner cases to the surface in a way that wouldn't have happened naturally, so that they can be highlighted for discussion in sympathetic media circles.
Edit: Tangentially related, from Lawrence v Texas with another somewhat manufactured situation:
"The gay rights advocates from Lambda Legal litigating the case convinced Lawrence and Garner not to contest the charges and to plead no contest instead.[29] On November 20, Lawrence and Garner pleaded no contest to the charges and waived their right to a trial. Justice of the Peace Mike Parrott found them guilty and imposed a $100 fine and court costs of $41.25 on each defendant. When the defense attorneys realized that the fine was below the minimum required to permit them to appeal the convictions, they asked the judge to impose a higher penalty. Parrott, well aware that the attorneys intended to use the case to raise a constitutional challenge, increased it to $125 with the agreement of the prosecutor.[30]"
All this is to say that if you treat people like hateful bigots, they're likely to become hateful bigots. This overreaction seems to have the potential to do harm than good.
Edit: I would love to have a dialogue with the downvoters - my email is in my bio.
edit: I've emailed HN for comment.
1. The Mirror should not be trusted. There are few trashier newspapers in the country. It’s is definitely not the sort of “source” that should be getting any airtime on HN.
2. The article is littered with inconsistencies.
https://www.college.police.uk/article/protecting-freedom-exp...
Writing FUD about the article just because it's in the S-n's little brother takes more effort than the googling.
It’s great to arrest those other people for saying things one doesn’t like. But in 30 years, different thoughts may be out of fashion.
When pushback gets [removed], not just downvoted, you start to think certain topics have unquestioned support. So it's easy to forget that what's mainstream or controversial on Reddit and Twitter can be very different than real life.
Based off of what? There's ample evidence of elected representatives on the rights passing laws that aim to reduce freedom of religion, speech, the press, and assembly. While on the left, the examples are always some rando on the internet saying something stupid which the reader decides is somehow a shared belief amongst millions of people.
40% of Americans aged 18-34 say the government should be able to prevent people from saying offensive statements about minority groups
27% for GenX, 24% for Boomers, 12% for Silent gen
1: https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2015/11/20/40-of-mille...
Probably has Irish ancestry but a British passport/accent.
Your view of "HN users" (excluding yourself from that group, presumably?) doesn't seem to align with my experiences.
I challenge you to come up with a source, any source, which hasn't done the same thing many times over when it comes to "culture war" issues. Please show me what a quality source looks like here...
Then they came for the pride swastika reposters and I did not speak out because I don’t care about shitty memes.
idk the rest yet
[0]: https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2021/09/09/pimmelgate-g...
The difference is this time the person indirectly insulted gay people, so people get to shoehorn "anti-woke" talking points into it.
So I guess the UK police are going to try to arrest the entire Internet? Show me a social media post that doesn't cause anxiety.
https://twitter.com/CygnusAmerica/status/1554654611868368902...
The alternative avenue is the police itself thought the material is of 'grossly offensive or of an indecent, obscene or menacing character' which would be next-level stupidity if the CPS actually agreed with.
We want people to have freedom of belief, but if their beliefs lead to widespread social exclusion, that can be a problem. Like, if I have a belief that red-haired people are secretly Lizard Illuminati and must therefore be denied from jobs and public life lest they gain access to levers of power... well, if I am too successful at spreading this belief, it really becomes a problem for red-haired people.
I don't know exactly how to negotiate this issue in a liberal society, but I think we need to recognize there is a real tradeoff between important liberal values here: freedom of belief versus inclusion for all in civil society. This isn't a place where you can just invoke one value or the other value and call it a day.
Considerations for navigating this tradeoff would likely include
1. How common the belief is, and thus its exclusionary power
2. The factual or rational basis of the belief
Where was it ever guaranteed in the first place?
1) Cancel culture, pronoun politics, militarized political correctness
2) retweeting a meme that highlights the connection those things have with nazis
Meanwhile, they would easily have retweeted a meme (in other words, engaged in propaganda) meant to disparage and slander homosexuals, although obviously they wouldn't not have associated homosexuality with Nazism or used the Swastika, as they considered homosexuality to be abhorrent. They most likely would have used a Star of David or other Jewish symbol instead.
The nazis were control freaks. All information channels (not just electronic, but also behavioral) were policed, and any information passing through those channels had to be authorized by the authorities.
Memes become popular through a bottom-up process. An image resonates with you and you share it with your network.
The LGBT movement (an entity separate from homosexuality itself) is not currently a bottom-up phenomenon. It’s subsidized and utilized by the world’s largest corporations, the largest media, the largest non-profits and nearly all western governments to push all kinds of agendas that appear to a great many of us as authoritarian and dangerous.
so much of the ways that nazis justified their evil acts were by making the jews out to be their oppressors, and the secret controllers of 'woke' politics of the time. it was a reactionary ideology then, and it's a reactionary ideology now.
when you cast yourself as 'the real victim' and use it as an excuse to mistreat a historically oppressed segment of society... yeah man, I see a lot in common with the nazis there, particularly in the realm of a group of people united by what they believe, fighting to hurt a group of people united by who they are.
There’s a very clear dividing line here. You support free speech (including what you don’t like or consider dangerous) or you don’t. One of those positions is a lot closer to the nazis than it’s proponents understand.
I assure you, the moment it is, we might as well tear down prison walls, because we're all guilty from somebody's point of view.
What happens if in the future your opinion on something is considered as bad as homophobia or Nazism?
The man looks exactly like a solitary moron begging for attention (successfully). He could use his scarce and precious time in this planet in a more productive way.
Western governments had claimed for a long time to value free speech and democracy but once social media actually gave normal people the ability to compete with large media companies governments quickly changed their mind.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups.
If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, unless they're evidence of some interesting
new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures.
If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
> Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate. If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it.
So perhaps don't cherry-pick which guidelines should be followed? Please just flag the article and move on; no need to comment.
Also:
> Please don't post on HN to ask or tell us something. Send it to hn@ycombinator.com.
Your post is better served as an email.
the future is here, it’s not evenly distributed
>Ouch flag designer, you really should have seen that coming.
- me
Even on the short walk from my hotel to $CUSTOMER in Southampton (hardly a metropolis), I counted more than forty surveillance cameras - and those were only the ones I could casually spot during a ten-minute walk...
In many (most?) cases public CCTVs are scarecrows.
A map of them in Southampton: https://www.southampton.gov.uk/council-democracy/council-dat... ("Comprises over 300 cameras, covering car parks and public spaces in the city and district", "Control room staffed 24 hours per day, 365 days per year")
320 in Plymouth: https://www.plymouth.gov.uk/crimepreventionandantisocialbeha...
NOoOo muuu freee speech aaa noo mih gubmintt rkfkdjd + countless mald posts + cope
HN if its some LGBT person being oppressed by the police:
Silence
One article [1] I found mentioned that there's an awareness course that "gives alleged offenders the chance to avoid prosecution." But I'm still not clear on what Mr. Brady would have been prosecuted for.
Questions I have that don't seem to be answered anywhere:
* What was the actual law that Mr. Brady was arrested under? * What was the actual reason that Mr. Brady was arrested? I know the officer said "for causing anxiety" - but I doubt there's a law on the books that makes "causing anxiety" a crime in the UK. * What are the actual relevant laws to arrest and detention of someone in the UK, and how are they differnet from the US? * Are there any laws about Nazi and similar hate symbols in the UK, similar to the ones that I believe exist in Germany? * I believe that free speech in the UK is generally subject to more restrictions than in the US, how does that affect this case?
Whether It would be great to see an actual news article that answered some of these questions, and not just this clickbait "poor army vet arrested for memeing" stuff.
[1] https://www.gbnews.uk/news/police-force-scraps-hate-crime-aw...
Communications Act (Malicious Communications) is the law he broke, it covers sending "offensive" messages online.
Policing and Crime Act (PACE) is where you need to look for arrest/interview/search procedures. Very different to the US.
Hate symbols usually come under Mal Comms (online), or Public Order.
There is no constitutional (or any, really) guarantee of free speech in the UK.
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/1998/42/schedule/1/part...
Starts well: “Everyone has the right to freedom of expression. This right shall include freedom to hold opinions and to receive and impart information and ideas without interference by public authority and regardless of frontiers.”
But then: “The exercise of these freedoms, since it carries with it duties and responsibilities, may be subject to …” (lots of conditions!)
It does seem to me the law in Ireland allows for this, but the PCC argument is there are more serious crimes going uninvestigated. However I don’t see anything here that doesn’t conform with what I’ve read Irish laws are (which are different than the US, why are people discussing the first amendment here?). Is it a silly use of time? Yeah. Should the local police have done a better job prioritizing? Yeah. Is this the sign of the progressive apocalypse? No. To me this reads as “local police make visibly bad judgement call and ends up as a meme.”
Karma police
Arrest this girl
Her Hitler hairdo
Is making me feel ill
And we have crashed her party
This is what you'll get
This is what you'll get
This is what you'll get
When you mess with us"The Constituent Assembly affirms the Portuguese people's decision to defend national independence, guarantee citizens' fundamental rights, establish the basic principles of democracy, ensure the primacy of a democratic state based on the rule of law and open up a path towards a socialist society"
Wishful thinking.
First off HN, don't post the Irish Mirror as a source, it's probably bullshit.
Secondly, this guy posted literal swastikas made of pride flags. The Nazis killed and experimented on gay people. Tyranny is what happens when we don't confront this behaviour.
Thirdly, this has been taken up as a cause celebre by such right-wing nutbags as Laurence Fox.
Hacker News is better than this and if its not, I don't want to be here.
What many people object to, for instance, are things like JK Rowling being cancelled because she dared say that women may not feel safe in toilets with men. This is the sort of things that prompted the original tweet although it is obviously a provocation (being by Laurence Fox, who is notorious in the UK).
Now, in any case, I don't believe that the original tweet or its thousands of retweets received a police response. And by and large the consensus seems to be that no crime has been committed. So the issue in this guy's case is that the police overreacted based on a single complaint, which they could have investigated simply by looking at the tweet...
> Tyranny is what happens when we don't confront this behaviour
The history of speech codes doesn't provide evidence for this claim. Actual historical Nazis were arrested for violating hate speech laws in the Weimar Republic, and used those arrests to promote their cause and their own victim narrative. Then when those same Nazis came to power they used speech laws to ban political dissent. Speech codes in the south in the US were used to arrest and harass civil rights activists on the basis that the were promoting racial animus and hate. The US used to lock people up for protesting the draft along similar arguments.
Anywhere you look speech codes are either used for oppression, or are useless in stopping hateful people. This happens because the either operate like the Streisand Effect or prohibit legitimate discussion and create zone of forbidden speech where hateful people can gather and disseminate their nonsense free from scrutiny and public debate. I highly recommend Free Speech: A History from Socrates to Social Media by Jacob Mchangama[1].
[1] https://www.amazon.com/Free-Speech-History-Socrates-Social/d...
I don’t want to take sides here but in general punishing people for hurting someone’s feelings is a bad thing in meritocracy (which I wish we had).
1. Look at a large amount of violent crimes
2. Handpick the ones committed against a specific identity.
3. Declare that this makes a huge problem in the (not crime in general, not socioeconomic factors leading to crime, but a specific identity being allegedly targeted more than others).
4. Make the identity feel entitled to public attention and guilt. Give them preferential treatment and special rights.
Voila! Now the public truly hates (as in doesn't like) the identity, so you can justify more identity politics, more spending, and keep the plebs distracted from the falling quality of life and other more tangible problems.