Met Police smash down door of Quaker meeting house to arrest activists
thetimes.com
thetimes.com
The most British thing I’ve read this year
> Quakers are one of the three historic peace churches and therefore have taken seriously the call to loving enemies and the practice of non-violence.
> "Jeremiah Dixon, happening upon a slave driver mercilessly beating a poor black woman. 'Thou must not do that!' he shouted. 'You be damned! Mind your own business,' came the reply. 'If thou doesn't desist, I'll thrash thee!'
> Tall and powerful, Jeremiah seized the slave-driver's whip and gave him a soun thrashing. When he returned to Cockfield, the whip came too, and was one of the Quaker family's treasured possessions."
Eating hummus and bread sticks.
/jk
For the UK in particular, people may point to how Labor swept the elections last year but they'd be wrong to say that there was left-wing momentum in the UK or even that it was another example of people voting against incumbent governments. Neither is true.
All that happened in the UK is the right-wing vote got split between the Conservatives and the even more right-wing Reform party. That's it. Come next election, that won't be the case. At the current rate, Conservative/Reform will merge or ally and sweep in a landslide. Starmer actually got fewer votes than Corbyn did in his previous two elections by a substantial margin.
The UK Labor party is playing the same role as the US Democratic Party. That is, they make occasional meek noises about institutional norms but they really don't oppose fascism at all. In fact, both parties are way more concerned with the rise of leftism than they are with fascism.
We've seen this exact same scenario play out in France. You have grooming victim [1] Macron who has tried to occupy some mythical "center" with Le Pen's National Front, the brainchild of leaders of Vichy France, playing the role of fascist party. But in France there's actually some leftist opposition. And what does Macron do? Routinely side with the fascists to keep the leftists out of power.
In the US, the role of Gestapo is being played by ICE. They take their marching orders from the Canary Mission to black-bag people who simply opposed Israel's genocide. This is quite literally picking up political dissidents and putting them into concentration camps.
The UK, France and Germany are well on their way to the same fate.
[1]: https://www.cnn.com/2017/05/06/politics/emmanuel-macron-wife...
Right-wing hate speech dominates social media because it's the normative position of our society. All of that existed long before social media. The only reason people think otherwise is probably because they were too young to observe it.
Segregation only officially ended ~60 years ago. Even after that we have had, and even continue to have, economic segregation.
Slavery might've been officially abolished ~160 years ago but it exists to this day in the form of convict leasing.
Queer people were criminalized and persecuted up until the late 20th century.
Women only really gained bodily autonomy in the 1960s and 1970s (and lost some of it in 2022).
Social media simply reflects how popular all of these ideas still are.
A lot of real-world economic segregation is directly linked the housing market, and then the leftists actively support it. When policy choices are adopted such that the market threatens to reduce the amount of segregation that a city or neighborhood is subjected to, leftists call that development "gentrification" and scream in protest against it.
Poor people mostly rent because they can't afford or can't get a mortgage. When an area gentrifies those people are forced out because the rents rise, and wealthy people move in. If you just look at the income distribution in the area it looks like "the population" became wealthier, but if you look at the individuals you find that the old residents have been forced out, and generally wind up poorer because of this (social networks disrupted, work further away etc).
Yes.
> ... and then the leftists actively support i
No, they don't.
Liberals (which really means neoliberals) support it. Here's a helpful diagram:
<--------- Left ------ Center ------- Right ------------->
+-------------------------+------------------------------+
} Cares about People | Cares about Property |
+-------------------------+------------------------------+
| Leftists/Progressives | (Neo)liberals |
+-------------------------+------------------------------+
| Socialism | Capitalism |
+-------------------------+--------------+---------------+
| Materialism | Idealism |
+-------------------------+--------------+---------------+
| | Democrats | Republicans |
+-------------------------+--------------+---------------+
Leftists also generally believe in "personal property" not "private property". That is, you can own your own home but you can't hoard housing.
How successful NIMBYism is in the US just shows you how normative right-wing attitudes are. done
All Russia needs to do is bribe corporations.
It is that easy.
More than 20 uniformed police, some equipped with Tasers,
forced their way into the Westminster meeting house [of worship]
and arrested six people at the meeting
on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.
[police] arrested five other people for the same offence on Friday
If we assume the best of the Met police, they first considered sending an officer over to talk to the Quakers and maybe offer some counsel.
And being the Met police and being faced with the potential of a non-violent resolution to a non-violent issue, the police instead opted for an approach that mirrors violent police raids.
That's if we assume the best of the Met police. They might not have ever considered a non-violent solution for Quakers.
That doesn't sound very peaceful does it
There's real levels of Naziesque behavior happening in the US and UK right now, but it's also not exactly the same and bad comparisons make it easier for many people to dismiss genuine concerns as hyperbolic (especially when one is in a targeted group, which i am, and trying to point out how bad things are getting).
https://www.standard.co.uk/news/london/met-police-arrest-act...
Given that the goal of the group is to draw attention to their causes, and police action caused them to recieve a huge amount of attention, the whole thing seems rather self defeating.
If the headline was "police raid house to arrest criminal activists", it wouldn't have made a blip.
If you’re willing to lie, the headline could be whatever you want.
I see you're au fait with contemporary journalism.
Same thing or perhaps worse is happening in Germany, US, etc.
One can just as well ask why would a democratic country arrest and threaten young people for protesting actions of a foreign country, when such actions include things like mass killings of children, or targeted attacks on healthcare and rescue workers, where said country sometimes just murders 15 of them while on a rescue mission (destroying 5 ambulances and a fire engine, basically killing all of the teams), like recently.
It's a worthy question that such an article can elicit regardless of who's being arrested for activism.
> A Met spokesman said six women had been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance, amid fears of a sit-down protest in the capital. None have been charged.