Government orders GitHub to remove Bluetooth-based chat app Bitchat: Jack Dorsey

and china. police in china generally is not armed. (china may or may not be considered a developed country, but i think that distinction is irrelevant. i am pretty sure there are more than three countries in the word where police is not armed, or where armed police is a distinct unit used only for specific tasks where arms are needed). but that wasn't the point i was making, rather, in most countries police simply does not get violent, nor do they have to fear being shot at, because of gun controls.

> Hayley Hodgson [...] was ordered to go to the facility after a friend of hers tested positive for the virus and she was identified as a “close contact” by the number plate on her scooter.

> spent 14 days at the Howard Springs mandatory Covid-19 quarantine facility

> "Police officers blocked my driveway. ’What’s going on, are you guys testing me for Covid? What’s happening?’ They said, ‘No, you’re getting taken away. And you have no choice. You’re going to Howard Springs. You either come with us now, and we’ll put you in the back of the divvy van. Or you can have a choice to get a Covid cab.’

> they were even threatening me that if I was to do this again, ‘We will extend your time in here.’”

> Ms Hodgson said she told police “I don’t consent to this”, and asked why she couldn’t “just self-isolate at home”. Police responded ‘We’ve just been told from higher up where to take you. And that’s all that there is,’”.

> She was told to pack her bags and that she would be released when she tested negative. During her two-week stay she was tested three times, and each time tested negative.

> The video includes footage filmed by Ms Hodgson during her stay as she argues with a police officer at the facility, who reprimands her for leaving her cabin without a mask and threatens her with a $5000 fine.

> “I’m gonna give you a warning, yeah?” he says to her as she sits on the balcony. “It’s an official warning that you have to stay on your balcony and obey the rules while you’re here.” When she argues with the officer that the rules don’t make sense, he replies that “it doesn’t have to make sense”. [...] “Highly infectious when all of us people are negative?” she asks. “So far. The risk is still very high,” he says.

> She said at one point when she was distressed and asking to be let out of her room to go for a walk or a run, facility staff instead offered her Valium to calm down.

> Ms Hodgson said as a result of her two-week stay she had lost her casual retail job. “They compensated me $1500 for the two weeks, and that was all,” she said. “Now I’m currently unemployed because of this situation”

Full interview with recordings from inside the Australian "internment camp" https://unherd.com/newsroom/inside-australias-covid-internme...

Mirror: https://archive.ph/GQDkN

Our governments have failed us worldwide.

I don’t know what we can do with that information. Feels both useless and that we’re helpless to fix it.

Most of this does not answer what I wrote. You do not address Teesta, border killings, India’s support for Sheikh Hasina, the CAA’s religious filter, or the fact that Savarkar explicitly excluded both Muslims and Christians from his conception of the Hindu nation. Instead, you move to the UCC, some students at your American college, Waqf property, burqas, loudspeakers and animal slaughter.

> The UN declaration is retarded because Indian law is not and has never been neutral to religion. If you believe it should be, then you are on the side of the BJP.

The fact that Indian personal law has historically not been religion neutral is not an argument against making it more neutral. It also does not follow that anyone who supports religion neutral law must support the BJP. Equality before the law, prohibition of religious discrimination, freedom of religion and the aspiration towards a uniform civil code all exist together in Articles 14, 15, 25 and 44 of the Constitution [1]. The BJP does not own the concept of equal law merely because it invokes it selectively.

I have no issue saying that instantaneous triple talaq should not have legal effect. That is separate from supporting every provision of the BJP’s legislation. The 2019 act does not declare triple talaq void but also it makes pronouncing an already legally ineffective divorce a criminal offence punishable by up to three years in prison [2]. Someone can support getting rid of triple talaq while questioning why an ineffective utterance requires that particular criminal penalty. Presenting the only options as either supporting the BJP’s complete policy or supporting discrimination against Muslim women is a false dichotomy.

> South Asian Muslims often want it both ways. When India got rid of triple talaq divorce, South Asian Muslims at my American college demanded a protest.

You are at an American college reporting what some South Asian Muslim students supposedly said. I am at an Indian college and do not see Muslims behaving in the way you keep describing. Neither experience proves much. My experience cannot establish that no Indian Muslim behaves this way, and your experience cannot establish that South Asian Muslims generally behave this way. You are repeatedly moving from some people you met, to South Asian Muslims, to Indian Muslims, and then to the inherent character of Islam. One campus anecdote should not carry that much weight.

> You took no time to read or understand what I said and instead assumed I was talking about European Jews. I am not. I am talking about Indian Jews.

Your clarification narrows the claim, but also makes the comparison nearly meaningless. There were only 22,480 Jews in India in 1941 [3]. They were an extremely small and geographically scattered minority. They could not reasonably demand a Jewish territorial state carved out of India in the manner that a community numbering tens of millions and concentrated across entire provinces could. Their failure to demand an Indian partition does not prove that they possessed some fundamentally different religious or moral character. It largely proves that no such political project was demographically possible.

Indian Jews also did exactly the broader thing you were presenting Jews as having rejected. After Israel was established, most Bene Israel emigrated there. The Hebrew University estimates that there are now around 80,000 Bene Israel in Israel and only about 3,000 in India [4]. This was large-scale migration by Indian Jews to a Jewish nation-state.

That does not make Indian Jews disloyal, nor does it make their migration identical to Jinnah demanding that India be divided. It does, however, destroy the idea that Indian Jewish integration proves Jews had no interest in religiously framed national self determination. They could be integrated into India and still migrate to Israel when a Jewish state became available. Both things can be true.

So the comparison fails in both directions. They were far too small to demand a viable Jewish state inside India, but when a Jewish state existed elsewhere, most of the community migrated to it. You cannot use them as a control group proving that Muslims uniquely politicised religion.

You have also basically stopped defending what you initially said about Savarkar. Your original description was that he had been a relatively benign nationalist and humanitarian until Muslim extremism caused him to snap. I then quoted his own definition of Hindutva, under which India must be both a person’s fatherland and holy land, and the passage in which he explicitly explains why Christians and Muslims are not Hindus in the relevant national sense [5].

Muslim violence does not explain his exclusion of Christians. Christians did not collectively persecute Savarkar into declaring them outside his cultural nation. Your answer that later Hindu nationalist rhetoric was not especially anti-Christian because Christians are a small minority does not defend his ideology either. If anything, it concedes that the groups emphasised by the movement depend upon political usefulness and demographic threat rather than some neutral humanitarian reaction.

You initially gave a psychological account of Savarkar as a humanist driven into extremism by what he witnessed. When confronted with what he actually wrote, you did not explain it. You simply moved to other subjects. The quote still stands, this was a worked out political definition of national belonging that explicitly distinguished Hindus from Muslims and Christians.

> Up until recently Muslims could claim any piece of private land and then privately judge whether such a claim had legal merit. Landowners were left without any possibility of appeal. Imagine such a thing in America, lol.

This is not an accurate description of the old Waqf Act. An individual Muslim could not simply point to someone’s house, privately declare it Waqf and award it to himself. Former Section 40 allowed the statutory Waqf Board to collect information about property it had reason to believe was Waqf property and decide the question after an inquiry [6].

There was a valid criticism here, the board was an interested administrative body being allowed to make the initial determination. I do not need to pretend that was a good arrangement. But the act expressly stated that the Board’s decision was final only unless it was revoked or modified by the Waqf tribunal. The tribunal had the powers of a civil court. Although the act excluded an ordinary appeal from the tribunal, Section 83(9) allowed an aggrieved person to ask the High Court to examine the record and confirm, reverse or modify the tribunal’s determination [6].

"No ordinary appeal" and "no legal remedy whatsoever" are not the same statement. Your quote removes the regulatory bodies like the tribunal and High Court revision, and replaces all of them with "Muslims could claim anything and privately judge it themselves". That is far more rhetorically useful, but it is not what the statute said.

America also does have a proecudre in the same broad family, called adverse possession, where a person possessing somebody else’s land can eventually acquire legal title without the original owner’s consent if state-specific conditions are met which has to be hostile, open and continuous for the statutory period [7].

Adverse possession is not identical to the old Waqf process and requires physical possession over a long period and eventual legal proof, it is not a religious board making an initial property classification. But that is precisely why the careful comparison matters. "Imagine a legal mechanism by which somebody can obtain title to another person’s property in America, lol" is not a devastating point you think it is, because America has one, the procedures and justifications are different, which is what should actually be debated.

[1]: https://www.indiacode.nic.in/bitstream/123456789/19150/1/con... [2]: https://www.indiacode.nic.in/bitstream/123456789/11564/1/a20... [3]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/4464913 [4]: https://cris.huji.ac.il/en/publications/the-bene-israel/ [5]: https://archive.org/stream/essentials-of-hindutva-veer-savar... [6]: https://www.indiacode.nic.in/bitstream/123456789/15941/1/the... [7]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/adverse_possession

> When Macron bans the burqa, people default to it being for cultural preservation and safety.

Macron did not introduce France’s public face-covering ban because the law was enacted in October 2010 [8]. Macron became president in 2017 [9]. It is formally a general prohibition on concealing the face in public, rather than a law that names only Muslim clothing, and the same legislation separately punishes forcing someone to conceal her face [8]. There can obviously be secular grounds for restricting face coverings in particular situations. Identity checks, examinations, courtrooms, secure buildings and circumstances in which someone is being coerced are all reasonable subjects for regulation. If a woman is being forced to wear a burqa or niqab, then punishing the coercer is entirely defensible.

But that does not make every general prohibition unquestionably secular or liberal. The European Court of Human Rights upheld the French law [10], while the UN Human Rights Committee later found that France violated the religious freedom of two women whom it fined for wearing the niqab [11]. The Netherlands has a partial prohibition applying to public transport and government, healthcare and educational premises rather than an unrestricted ban in every public place [12].

European states therefore do not have one obvious consensus under which all burqa restrictions are merely neutral safety measures. Different countries regulate them differently, and major human-rights institutions have disagreed about the limits. You can defend a restriction on secular grounds, especially where identification or coercion is involved, without pretending that every restriction proves Europe has correctly diagnosed the nature of Islam.

> Europe is a great example. The Muslim population of Europe is miniscule but Europeans are even more vitriolic against them than Indians.

The fact that Europeans complain about Muslims does not prove every complaint is true, much less that the cause must be the "aggressive nature" of Islam. That is circular, Muslims are supposedly aggressive because people dislike them, and people’s dislike is then justified because Muslims are supposedly aggressive. Hostility towards a group cannot itself be used as proof that the group deserves hostility. Europe also involves a very different political question. A large part of its debate concerns recent migration, asylum and integration. Indian Muslims are not recently arrived foreigners asking a host population to tolerate them. They are citizens from communities that have lived in the subcontinent for centuries. Millions remained in India after Partition and had to define their citizenship and belonging within the Indian republic [14].

Immigration policy concerns who may enter and settle in a country. Constitutional equality concerns how a country treats citizens who already belong to it. Conflating the two rhetorically turns Indian Muslims into permanent immigrants whose rights depend on whether the majority presently finds their behaviour agreeable.

> When the government tries to stop the streets from being filled with lambs blood, Indian Muslims complain that it’s discrimination.

Slaughtering animals in public streets can be restricted on grounds of sanitation, or obstruction of public space. India’s prevention of cruelty to animals rules state that, within municipal areas, animals generally may not be slaughtered except in recognised or licensed slaughterhouses and set requirements involving veterinary examination, drainage and the collection of blood [15]. Apply those rules. I have no objection to that. But apply them as rules governing slaughter, sanitation and public space, not as evidence that one religion has an inherently aggressive nature.

United States federal law expressly recognises slaughter performed according to Jewish or other religious ritual requirements as a legally humane method [16]. European Union law permits a religious rites exception from prior stunning requirements when the slaughter occurs in a slaughterhouse [17]. The British government publishes instructions for legally conducting halal and kosher slaughter without prior stunning [18].

And is animal sacrifice uniquely Muslim. Goats are sacrificed daily to Kali at Kalighat, and the Indian legal dispute there has included whether the practice should be prohibited, regulated or concealed from public view [19]. I am not arguing that Hinduism is therefore an aggressive religion, that inference would be as irrelevant as the one you are making about Islam. It shows that slaughter can exist within more than one religious tradition and can be regulated through neutral public health law, and maybe animal welfare. Practices change when institutions, and culture change and if public slaughter creates a health problem, regulate public slaughter. There is no need to transform a solvable civic problem into a theory about the unchangable nature of millions.

The same applies to loudspeakers and the occupation of roads. Impose neutral limits on noise, hours, sanitation and obstruction, and apply them to mosques, temples, churches, political rallies, wedding processions and every other group. Article 25 itself subjects religious practice to public order, morality and health and allows the regulation of secular activity associated with religion [1]. What is not neutral is treating a Muslim violation as evidence about Islam’s aggressive essence while treating similar majority practices as ordinary Indian culture. India has no shortage of temple loudspeakers, processions, road occupations, public animal sacrifice or politically protected religious gatherings.

This is the same special pleading that existed in your previous response. Hindutva is granted history, fear, political incentives, trauma and provocation. Muslim conduct is reduced to “the aggressive nature of the religion”. Indian Jews are treated as comparable to a population thousands of times larger when that helps your argument, while their mass migration to Israel is ignored. Your experiences at an American college become evidence about Indian Muslims, while sourced descriptions of Indian politics are dismissed as Western misunderstanding.

And after all of this, you still do not answer the original causal claim. None of the material about triple talaq, Waqf property, burqas, loudspeakers or animal slaughter establishes that Bangladeshi distrust of India is mainly religious. None of it converts Savarkar’s articulated political ideology into a merely defensive reflex. It is a collection of grievances about Muslims being used to avoid defending the propositions that were actually challenged.

[8]: https://www.legifrance.gouv.fr/jorf/id/JORFTEXT000022911670 [9]: https://www.elysee.fr/en/emmanuel-macron [10]: https://hudoc.echr.coe.int/eng?i=002-9952 [11]: https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2018/10/france-banni... [12]: https://www.government.nl/faq/ban-on-face-coverings/what-doe... [13]: https://www.pewresearch.org/religion/2017/11/29/europes-grow... [14]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/muslim-belonging-in-sec... [15]: https://www.dahd.gov.in/sites/default/files/2026-05/SLAUGHTE... [16]: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/7/1902 [17]: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/eli/reg/2009/1099/oj/eng [18]: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/halal-and-kosher-slaughter [19]: https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-law-and-r...

https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/1v6k8vq/several_injur...

The US has almost entirely lost this culture except for short moments in isolated places. Minneapolis is nearly a proof by exception in this. Very, very few people need to be detained or killed to get the mass of Americans to stay inside and self-censor. Much less is required to get businesses to put their head down and play nice with the government.

You name things and decide that‘s “resistance”. People break the law because there’s no real consequence or because they just have nothing to lose. They’re not “resisting”, they’re surviving. The US society decided that a large class of people will be forced to operate at that level their whole life and are incentivized to do worse by the insane punishment model applied only to them.

The only people doing the “resisting” in the US are those who can afford a good lawyer. Everyone else does what the cracks in the system allow, or what they need to do out of desperation.

No German Uber driver is desperate enough to risk their whole livelihood especially for that meager payoff. Most civilized countries make sure that people have something to lose which will keep people acting straight rather than always act on desperation. Depending on your goal, having people exercise self restraint works better than restraining them with tasers, chokeholds, and bullets to the back.

> because their alternatives are worse.

Ah, ok. So not “a healthy culture of resistance” but more “desperation because the country made sure that’s driving them”.

After living under one of those totalitarian regimes, all Incan say is that everything sounds easy in an HN comment typed from the safety of a democratic society.

As a note, I think you meant authoritarian; authoritative means “preeminent/most trustworthy”