The UK throwing a very big rock at a thin glass house.
I don’t agree with any such laws in any country, but I think it’s important to point out the hypocrisy here
Americans can never call out human rights abuses because of slavery. The British can never because of colonialism. Period. Forever.
If you find this line of argumentation compelling there’s no discussing anything with you.
Sinking half a dozen ships in international waters is a crime.
Sanity would ask for intercepting those boats in your waters, and that's it, controlling what's in them, who are these people and send them in front of a court if they breached your law, on your soil (or waters).
Yet we are at the point nobody raises the voice where sinking civilian ships on the basis it's drug smugglers (without providing a proof, let alone the fact that even if it was true it's still insane) has any leftover of decency or justice.
Or calling for the annexation of Greenland and Panama by any means.
Or bombing Iran on the basis that it's developing nuclear weapons on behalf of the Israeli government (which is an act of war if Iran could wage it, the US does not get to decide who can have a nuclear weapon and who does not).
The list of breaches in decency or law is basically infinite.
Citation needed.
Instead of letting more countries develop these weapons, we should work on denuclearizing all countries, starting with the US and Russia and their insane arsenals! And maybe build a unified international legal framework for civilian nuclear developments and applications from energy to medical outside of the "security council's" ferule!
A nuclear war cannot be won, thus never fought!
Not unilaterally by Israel calling the world's superpower for help.
Your logic is as sound as "since my neighbor makes something illegal at home, I'm gonna shoot him and then call my buddy sheriff for help". It is obviously illegal.
I was replying to "the US does not get to decide who can have a nuclear weapon and who does not". As much as I agree with that... my previous comment.
We're not talking about a nuclear program.
https://freespeechunion.org/police-make-30-arrests-a-day-for...
Neither are quite the same thing as railroading a government critic for "sedition"
What's the solution? The alternative, where we can't criticize our governments on account of their hypocrisies and imperfections, robs citizens of their check against an institution with a monopoly on violence.
> Americans can never call out human rights abuses because of slavery. The British can never because of colonialism. Period. Forever.
There's certainly a difference between holding countries responsible for events that have long since ceased and holding a government responsible for double standards practiced presently. The UK lacks credibility on Hong Kong when its own citizens are being jailed on the basis of overbroad hate speech regulations and when its government agencies attempt to claim extraterritorial jurisdiction over the operation of foreign social media companies. Westminister can't be so empty-headed as to believe that its actions will go unnoticed by other governments.
If the point in bringing up the hypocrisy is to end or distract the discussion, it is whataboutism. However, if the point is to compare two instances of a thing to make a point it’s fair game imo.
There is nothing logically wrong with hypocrisy. I tell my toddlers not to do stuff I do all the time.
The problem with hypocrisy comes when one party is assumed to have more rights than the other. In this case, why would Britain (or the US's) government be allowed to be more corrupt than China's?
I assume Britain is brought up due to the British government's historic role in Hong Kong and China.
-@dril, 2014
Its a common fallacy to accuse alive people of hypocrisy done by other people who came before them.
With relation to the article + Grand parent, the government first of all does not write on behalf of the BBC and in fact both Labour and Conservatives especially have had massive problems with its editorial decisions.
The ideal the you cannot criticise the government in the UK and that our laws here are similar to the ones in HK is honestly not a fair parallel at all.
I think the government are extremely naive and the security services try to push them into extremely stupid decisions on encryption.
I don't think that's a fair characterisation. Recently we've convicted:
- an ex-footballer (i.e. someone with the means to mount a proper defence) for calling someone a 'diversity hire'; and
- someone burning a religious text in the street, as a protest.
And those are just successful convictions, not initiated prosecutions, or the wider chilling effects of it all.
Even if what you said were true, those two things are largely legal in the US, so I wouldn't really say it's their tabloids over-hyping it as much as they legitimately find the actual standards here questionable.
I looked up the case against Joey Barton and it looks like he was deliberately trying to antagonise and abuse people upset which yes is illegal here. He could have easily made any points he wanted without abusing people. Note that he was given a suspended sentence in the hope that he would stop abusing people and has served no jail time as yet. Seems like a sensible decision.
The Quran burning outside the Turkish Consulate was even more weak stuff from you. The guy was fined £240 and told not to do it again.
Neither of these are about freedom of speech are they, they are about abuse online and deliberately trying to provoke muslims.
Does this matter? The question is whether the UK has a moral authority to tell China off over free speech. Nobody has said that different countries don't have varying types of restrictions on speech.
Even if I agreed with your characterisation of the US, you're talking about visitors, not residents or citizens. The UK also regularly denies visas for speech.
You're defending against whataboutism from China to the UK by invoking whataboutism from the UK to the US here.
> I looked up the case against Joey Barton and it looks like he was harassing people online which yes is illegal here.
No, harassment is a specific and different offence. He was convicted specifically for sending 'grossly offensive' messages, not harassing people. The definition of that crime is based on the content of the messages, not the pattern of their transmission.
> The Quran burning outside the Turkish Consulate was even more weak stuff from you. The guy was fined £240 and told not to do it again.
I don't really get how this refutes anything I've said. It's illegal to protest in this manner in the UK.
What is your argument here, that OK it's illegal but the punishment is not very severe so no problem? You understand that the specifics of _what_ is illegal is the criticism.
> Neither of these are about freedom of speech are they, they are about harassment online and deliberately trying to provoke muslims.
Neither of these is about harassment. Or they would have been convicted of harassment.
Of course they do? Think we've descended into absurdity here if that's the claim.
Suffice to say, the Chinese response to Jimmy Lai would be along the lines of "well of course he has free speech, if only he did it in a completely different way that was acceptable to my sensibilities".
Crticisim of religion, through symbolic speech, is pretty classically part and parcel of the tenets of free speech. It's hardly some fringe belief.
Even if you think calling someone a 'diversity hire' is often untrue, or often racist, or some such thing, there are surely some cases where it is true or a legitimate criticism of hiring policy. Should we not be able to claim as much? On peril of imprisonment?
I don't think your views on this are particularly uncommon. It's just that British people don't have a history of wrestling with free speech, or its importance. Tone policing is a thought-terminating cliche in the UK.
"But when posts deliberately target individuals with vilifying comparisons to serial killers or false insinuations of paedophilia, designed to humiliate and distress, they forfeit their protection.
"As the jury concluded, your offences exemplify behaviour that is beyond this limit – amounting to a sustained campaign of online abuse that was not mere commentary but targeted, extreme and deliberately harmful."
Seems like you're just lying with the 'diversity hire' content of Barton's posts aren't you?
None of this meets the bar for me, and ironically would not be illegal in China or the US, to address the original point.
Can we not simply condemn that?
Now you’re just condemning what you’ve already done. Why should anyone respect it? At some point you loose respect and eventually you just look confused.
Unfortunately, just like whataboutism can be a disingenuous rhetorical device, so is anti-whataboutism. Sometimes the comparison is relevant, sometimes it's not. In this case, I think it is.
It's not whataboutism to point up the current messed up situation is not unrelated to the behavior of the UK, and their fingerprints are all over it. Of course things aren't static and new actors have changed the conversation, but this doesn't absolve them and they shouldn't be pointing fingers.
If you’re saying historically as an imperial power we’ve done terrible stuff we can all agree with that!
Since it fell from power, the UK does everything the US wants.
However, historically it set up a lot of bad things that happened in the Middle East, China, Africa, etc. The UK cannot untangle itself from it, "it's all in the past", because history is terribly influenced by things in the past, by definition.
Authorities and government? Yes. Even if the current ones weren't born when history was made, it's their duty to understand the history of the country they are governing, and of how past decisions shaped the world as it currently is.
> I honestly don’t think the UK has done much to harm other countries since the Iraq War which obviously made everything worse.
The history of Hong Kong itself is deeply influenced by Great Britain's actions (as well as other world powers, of course), and it doesn't start with mainland China's takeover.
Another example of UK's actions deeply influencing the current world, unrelated to China, is Iran (and well, the Middle East in general). So the UK cannot simply point fingers at others and forget about how they helped shape the situation.
One can also ask how HK ended up with English language and common law in the first place… though that wasn’t so recent.
And all that. We're all evil at one point or another, from someone's perspective.
Especially when it comes to China and Russia, people seem to think they're about as bad as the West when nothing could be further from the truth.
Maybe thats due to more people from the hard right haunting this place, or the general shift of the tech crowd to the right. I'm not sure what it is exactly.
That quote gets bent very far out of context. You could use it to justify any inaction under that interpretation, on the theory that you are not qualified to take it simply due to being imperfect.
Not sure where you get this from?
For me it means even "evil" people/countries can raise valid points, nothing more, nothing less.
Christ, we need more woodworking classes for kids on the tech path.
Christ, we really need reading comprehension classes and ideally poetry classes or something similar, since people are unable to read more than the actual characters today it seems... Seems extra problematic in software/programming circles, maybe we need to add arts classes to science programs too?
Well, I didn't, I referenced exactly what I wanted to reference. It's OK to go back into the cave now.