12 ms·

Say what you will about the US, but the UK and Australia seem to be trying to competing in a speed run to see who can reach ridiculous authoritarianism faster.

• cyanydeez 4y ago
  • tonmoy 4y ago
    I have no idea what you are talking about, can you elaborate please?
  • trident5000 4y ago
    • deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
• mort96 4y ago
  You say "... the way they have literally arrested people for tweets", as if "tweets" is a special "thing" , but it's just communication. If something is illegal to say, it stands to reason that it would be illegal to say through the medium of a tweet. Is it less ridiculous to arrest people from what they write in a blog post or what they say on the street than what they say in a tweet? It seems like one should either take free speech absolutist approach and say speech should never be illegal, or accept that some speech is illegal which would obviously mean that it's illegal even on Twitter. But you're not the first person I've seen who seemingly find it extra ridiculous to react to something someone tweeted, as if publishing a tweet or a series of tweets is not an act of speech, and I don't understand it.
  • dfxm12 4y ago
    The "special thing" in terms of authoritarianism was the arrest part, not the tweet part. Arresting for (offline) communication is not unheard of in the UK, as evidenced by anti-monarchist protesters getting arrested for expressing their views during Charles' proclamation.
    • mort96 4y ago
      If I was talking about someone arrested for speaking against the monarchy on Twitter, I wouldn't talk about that as someone being "arrested for a tweet", maybe I would talk about someone being "arrested for tweeting critically about the monarchy" or just "arrested for being critical of the monarchy". If one thinks the speech in question should be legal, you'd think one would mention the kind of speech, not just the medium. As it is, we can't judge for ourselves whether the arrest is warranted or not, which is kind of a big deal when the arrest is used by robswc to illustrate how the UK is approaching authoritarianism.
      • karatinversion 4y ago
        An example discussed earlier this year on HN: Joseph Kelly tweeted > the only good Brit soldier is a deed one, burn auld fella, buuuuurn in relation to Tom Moore’s death. He deleted the tweet after 20 minutes. He was convicted of grossly offensive communications under the Communications Act, and was sentenced to 18 month’s probation and 150 hours of unpaid work.
        • skorpeon87 4y ago
          That's certainly crass, but it shouldn't be illegal to say. If people don't want to support their country's military and servicemen, that should be their business; it's a legitimate political position to take. Not least because all British soldiers are volunteers, and most of what British soldiers have been doing for the past generation is tagging along with American imperial military adventurism.
      • robswc 4y ago
• ellrob88 4y ago
  By 'journalist' are you referring to the recent firebombing of the house of YouTube personalty friendlyjordies? Love the guy, but it sounds like you're implying this is an example of an attack on independent journalism, and think the government is involved? Perhaps worth reviewing the reliability /agenda of your news sources?
  • dylan604 4y ago
    Would it require it to have gov't involvement to be bad? Let's say that the leader of a country stood up on a stage during a speech (which was preceded by years of pro-violence rhetoric) that was very suggestive of committing acts of violence. Would that be gov't involvement even if it the violence was actually perpetrated by private citizens?
    • ellrob88 4y ago
      No, I don't think the government needs to be directly involved for it to be considered bad. The example you describe sounds very bad to me. But my comment was questioning OP's suggestion that the incident was tied to authoritarianism.
      • dylan604 4y ago
        You do realize I wasn't describing a hypothetical situation, right?
        • ellrob88 4y ago
          I kinda assumed you were referring to Trump (?) But my point all along has been that "youtube personality getting house firebombed" != "ridiculous authoritarianism in Australia". If you are arguing against this point, I may need you to explain further.
          • dylan604 4y ago
            I don't follow Australian politics closely, so what has/hasn't been said by its leaders is unknown to me. I was merely suggesting that if a leader has insinuated that something like that wouldn't be a bad idea, then some might say you now how a gov't official involved.
• Laarlf 4y ago
  Most first world countries do not really have freedom of speech. While the headlines are quite excessive from UK and Australia (for obvious reasons), there are a lot of countries where the simple existence of those laws are never talked about. Denial of the holocaust is illegal in a lot of countries, denial of historic events in a few less, insulting people in a few more. Getting pulled through the legal system because you showed a middle finger to someone or because you said that some random war crime was not really that bad is a thing that just should not happen. But it is a thing that happened before. Protests and speech being regulated has the effect of everyone just trying to not get jailed. Even if there are no big headlines about it. And that damage is arguably worse than media coverage, which pulls attention to the issue.
  • mcv 4y ago
    Are you aware that those first world countries you call out, still have way more freedom of speech than almost all other countries? You can freely criticise all the governments of those countries. You can disagree with them, you can mock them, you can challenge their claims. Nobody in the US has gone to prison for their "alternative facts". Compare this to Russia where discussing the war can land you in prison for 15 years, China with its extreme censorship, and plenty of other countries where criticising powerful people or reporting inconvenient news can get you in all sorts of trouble. It's true you can't say everything. That's always been true, but in recent centuries and decades it has moved from banning what's inconvenient to the powerful to banning that what hurts the powerless. Libel and slander are illegal, threats are illegal. There's the classic example of yelling "fire!" in a crowded theater. Planning crimes is illegal despite the fact that that's all just speech. But it's all speech that can lead to situations in which innocent people get hurt. Or silenced, or compelled to do things they don't want to do, or otherwise limited in their freedom. And the same is true for hate speech. We've seen what it leads to. It creates a culture where the people being attacked are more likely to get hurt. Words aren't harnless; they're powerful. It's why free speech is important. But it's also why we shouldn't tolerate lies meant to hurt vulnerable people.
    • Laarlf 4y ago
      "[...]you can mock them[...]" is already something that i do not agree with. This could very easily be seen as an insult and in court you would get fucked over. But then again, I am not american. It is illegal to show the middle finger here. Even to objects. Welcome to Germany. I would say that the US still has freedom of speech. Just with a lot of cops that should not be cops at all. My country? No.
• inopinatus 4y ago
  I'm Australian and this remark is lunatic-fringe hogwash. These governments are not firebombing domestic youtube-grade nonentities or anyone else, nor are they enabling it. The notable corruption we saw recently was Scott Morrison making himself a secret minister of several portfolios, and for these and other sins the electorate severely rebuked his party at recent state and federal elections. That is what democracy, not authoritarianism, looks like. The folks you should be suspicious of are those spoonfeeding these garbage takes to the credulous.
  • Manuel_D 4y ago
    Democracy that infringes on rights and liberties is still authoritarianism. Trump was democratically elected, did that make his bans on Muslims entering the US or other such policies any less authoritarian? Without protections of civil liberties democracy is easily capable of resulting in authoritarianism. As the saying goes, two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner is a democracy.
    • kneebonian 4y ago
      > Trump was democratically elected, did that make his bans on Muslims entering the US or other such policies any less authoritarian? This is nonsense, Trump never put a ban on Muslims, from the ACLU (a stronlgy anti-Trump organization) President Donald > Trump signed an Executive Order that banned foreign nationals from seven predominantly Muslim countries from visiting the country for 90 days, suspended entry to the country of all Syrian refugees indefinitely, and prohibited any other refugees from coming into the country for 120 days.[1] Banning people from certain countries is a whole different ball game than banning people from a certain religion, further the country with the world's largest Muslim population, Indonesia wasn't even on the list. Let me ask you how do you feel about the government labeling and suppressing misinformation? [1] https://www.aclu-wa.org/pages/timeline-muslim-ban https://www.aclu-wa.org/pages/timeline-muslim-ban
      • Manuel_D 4y ago
        Trump repeatedly stated that the point of the ban was to ban Muslims from entering the country. Your own source calls it a "Muslim ban": > As the Muslim ban went into effect on Saturday, lawyers from the ACLU-WA and the NW Immigrant Rights Project rushed to SeaTac Airport to help immigrants on incoming flights who were being denied entry to the U.S. Kind of hard to take this seriously, when your own source contradicts you. As an analogy, conservatives talk about gun bans in California and New York yet bolt action rifles remain legal there. Not every gun is banned, so it's wrong to call it a "gun ban"? > Let me ask you how do you feel about the government labeling and suppressing misinformation? They shouldn't and the fact that said governments are democracies doesn't make it any less authoritarian.
• yarg 4y ago
  NZ's giving it a bit of a go. We're pushing legislation that moves the country away from democracy, and hate crimes laws that prohibit mocking religion.
• freefruit 4y ago
  As an Australian this true, but does vary a bit depending on each state. Most Aussies want more government control in their lives and are rather apathetic.
  • dmix 4y ago
    > Most Aussies want more government control in their lives You don't have to look far, there's plenty of them in this thread defending it.
• rstuart4133 4y ago
  We do have some utterly bizarre shit going down in Australia, like this: https://www.maddocks.com.au/insights/high-court-confirms-media-outlets-are-liable-for-defamatory-facebook-comments https://www.maddocks.com.au/insights/high-court-confirms-med... > the decision of Justice Rothman of the Supreme Court of NSW in Voller v Nationwide News Pty Ltd, extended the reach of defamation law such that media outlets could be held liable as ‘publishers’ for defamatory Facebook comments made by third parties on the media outlets’ Facebook posts. But it was a Judge, not the government. And it was the big media that as targeted, not Joe Citizen. Yet the net effect was a curtailment of Joe Citizen's ability to broadcast their thoughts on the news of the day, and how it was reported. The size of the penalty his honour handed out and the broadness of the ruling meant there was only one sane response from the media giants: heavy moderation of their comment sections, or shut them down. They mostly chose shut down. Heavy moderation is very expensive, so I don't blame them. The end result has been a biggest reduction of internet speech, comment and civil discourse triggered by news events I've seen in 20 years. Yet it strangely goes mostly unmentioned. Instead we get these conspiracy theories. I guess a conspiracy theory is more titillating than gross incompetence by one powerful individual. If want to go for conspiracy theories try this: why the haven't the law makers drafted a new law to fix the judicial mistake?
  • dmix 4y ago
    The governments are largely just a product of the nosiest citizens. So there is always a connection to 'Joe Average'. You see defenders of censorship all over HN these days, especially by people from the UK and Australia. The people saying "it's nothing to worry about because it only happens to bad people who deserved it" sort of defenses that pop up early on. Then when authoritarianism naturally grows larger and larger people only blame the politicians, not the people defending it every chance they get.
• deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]