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I completely agree with this. I live in the UK and when I raise concerns about government surveillance here people often say, "I've got nothing to hide". I le

by kypro 3y ago

I completely agree with this. I live in the UK and when I raise concerns about government surveillance here people often say, "I've got nothing to hide". I learnt of a case just this week where a guy on Reddit left a slightly controversial comment and ended up being charged with hate speech, lost his job and received hate abuse online for his opinion. It was kinda crazy because "all" he said was that didn't care about a teen who died in police custody, specifically that this teen was a, "good for nothing, spice smoking, Toxteth monkey" (Toxteth being a fairly rough inner-city area of Liverpool). The teen he was insulting was dead and unable to take offence, but the police officer on Reddit at the time took offence and decided to prosecute the guy anyway. I'm bringing this up because I don't think most people in the UK realise this. Insulting people online or just saying something mildly offensive will often lead to prosecution. I mean just this week an autistic child got arrested for calling a lesbian police officer a lesbian here in the UK. We all have something to hide when what's right and wrong is this arbitrary. Legal notes: I do not agree with the views of the Redditor referenced in my comment. I understand how someone may be offended by what he said, but disagree specifically with it being an offence to state an offensive position online. I also do not agree with the behaviour autistic child mentioned in my comment. I understand that being autistic is not an excuse for being offensive. Again, I am only bringing this up because I do not believe it should be an offence to offend. The offensive language used in my comment were direct quotes used specifically to make a point.

_a_a_a_ 3y ago
> It was kinda crazy because "all" he said was that didn't care about a teen who died in police custody, specifically that this teen was a, "good for nothing, spice smoking, Toxteth monkey" " Rowan O’Connell, 23, was hit with a fine by magistrates today over the sick outbust following the death of Mzee, 18. The teenager, described by his mother as a “gentle giant”, died after becoming unwell while detained by police officers at Liverpool ONE in July. O’Connell took to social media website Reddit, where he made baseless allegations, labelling Mzee a “good for nothing, spice smoking, Toxteth monkey”. He added: “As I say, who gives a f**.” " https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/watch-moment-web-troll-who-11918656 https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/watch-mo... So, Not quite what you said. > or just saying something mildly offensive will often lead to prosecution That's not mild, and you either know it or should know it. > I mean just this week an autistic child got arrested for calling a lesbian police officer a lesbian here in the UK. No link eh? What a surprise. --- edit: this isn't about the rights/wrongs of what was said in this case but your (deliberately?) incomplete description of them. I actually share your concern about freedom of speech but twisting facts doesn't build your case well.
- edholland 3y ago
  Here's a link to the story about the autistic teen incident https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/police-arrest-autistic-teenager-lesbian-b2391381.html https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/police-arrest-autistic...
- dbsmith83 3y ago
  > He added: “As I say, who gives a f***.” (sic) I don't understand your point. You both said the exact same thing: "good for nothing, spice smoking, Toxteth monkey", except you also said the guy added "Who gives a fuck?" which basically means "who cares?". Does adding a "who cares?" make the originally phrase much different?
barrysteve 3y ago
I wouldn't annoy a police officer before the Pan-Opticon was installed anyway. When a Cop in the 90s arrests a guy because the cop got annoyed at something the 'suspect' said, you had the option to blame it on the cop's thin-skinned personality. Now annoyed cops can use the law directly. The UK police implicitly allowing retributive online abuse is subtly humorous.
sacrosancty 3y ago
[dead]
bemusedthrow75 3y ago
> Insulting people online or just saying something mildly offensive will often lead to prosecution. "will often": no, not at all. Could occasionally. You're not helping your argument by overstating this. The courts are not stuffed with people being fined for saying things that are "mildly offensive". And nothing of what you're talking about is government surveillance. The police aren't the government, and the police do not routinely surveil the populace. They wouldn't have the staff, for one thing! The police actually wanted to close the police station in the town in which I live -- population over 100,000 in the wider borough -- and replace it with what amounted to a kiosk and service from police stations five miles away in each direction. And yes, really: for those viewers who persist in believing that the surveillance system in Hot Fuzz exists in reality... nope
- ekianjo 3y ago
  > The police aren't the government, The police is the dog of the government. What difference does it make to you if the dog or the master attacks you?
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    I understand that in the simplest way this is true, and I am sure it is very clever, poetic and pithy. But this is not how it works in principle or in practice in the UK. The police work on behalf of the people, not the government. When government manages to suborn the police in even a small way it is very much noticed. It’s difficult for people outside the UK to see this, I suppose, but our experience with this is that state directed police overreach is now unusual, and there is a lot of pushback from the chief police officers and the public when they are asked to oppress. There are aberrations (no police force in the world gets protest management right, and ours is no exception) but in general you have to be consciously right up in their faces to cause such an aberration. The UK is a country of realpolitik at every level. The police go about their business unarmed, with the consent of the population, and generally speaking, they know the public will not put up with overreach anymore. We may find them pompous and overbearing but they are pretty much the envy of the world still.
version_five 3y ago
There's two separate issues here. Privacy should be a right, I agree. But also we shouldn't tolerate our countries becoming authoritarian police states. It's already happened in the UK early, Australia and Canada are well on the way, and the US isn't far behind. Good privacy as a substitute for a government that isn't batshit crazy is not going to work in any event. Advocate privacy, but also advocate not letting giving power to insane elements of our society like this.
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  I find this notion that the UK is a police state quite hilarious. Ours is not the country where the police bring guns to seemingly every minor dispute and fairly often draw them. Ours is not the country where police kill you for resisting arrest, stand by while your kids are murdered in a school, or seize your money out on border roads without needing cause. Ours is not the country with a toxic plea bargaining system that throws the book routinely and a 90% conviction rate, or prosecutors who run for election on promises to be ever tougher. Ours is not the country with three strikes laws, death penalties, tent prisons run by fascist antiheroes, rampantly profiteering private prisons, corrupt local sheriffs, newspapers getting raided when they investigate the local police chief, Stand Your Ground and SWATting. Yeah. We overpolice people being rude. It matters when you have the equivalent of one fifth of the population of the USA crammed into a country a bit smaller than Michigan. Batshit crazy is clearly subjective, right? Try looking at things from a different perspective.
  - ekianjo 3y ago
    If its not a police state why do you need widespread videocamera surveillance? Seems like you have an arbitrary definition of what a police state should be. If the police just needs to take interest in you to find something to jail you because you are breaking hundreds of laws everyday anyway, this is a police state.
    - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
      We don’t really have it in the way people in the US and those places influenced by their perception have come to believe. My experience is that US people tend to think that the police can follow you all over the place in real time using cameras. They cannot. They might be able to get the legal right to CCTV footage of all sorts of cameras but they will have to have the paperwork and knock on doors, not unlike the way they could in the USA. This is regulated by law. Government and the police owns surprisingly little of the cameras in the UK. The vast majority are in private hands, and there is no “network” of them. Basically this perception of CCTV in the UK is unfounded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_United_Kingdom#Number_of_cameras https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite... > If the police just needs to take interest in you to find something to jail you because you are breaking hundreds of laws everyday anyway, this is a police state Then the UK is not one, because this is your imagination. It bears no resemblance to the reality of life in the UK. It sounds like a closer fit for the plea bargain culture of the USA. Plea bargains are not a general part of our judicial process or culture. So if the government wants to use the threat of a dozen other violations to make you talk, they will have to get the CPS to take them to trial, because as a general rule the system does not allow you to be pressured into pleading guilty on something else in return. Our system has a much lower conviction rate. I do not, in fact, have an arbitrary definition of what a police state is. But this is the point. US commentators define “police state” to mean something narrow that does not overlap with the justice and incarceration culture of the USA, which has more police corruption than most of the developed world, and which is more unequally applied than most.
fsckboy 3y ago
> I learnt of a case just this week where a guy on Reddit left a slightly controversial comment and ended up being charged with hate speech, lost his job and received hate abuse online for his opinion. the guy publically posted a racist comment in the UK where there is not an unlimited right of free speech and anti-social behavior is regulated. I don't see the privacy concern. I prefer an unlimited right of free speech, but I don't call it privacy. This guy did have something to hide, shoulda kept it hidden.
- midasuni 3y ago
  Where does have an unlimited right of free speech? Because once you start threatening politicians in the US see how far it gets you. Post a picture of yourself with an AR15 and a comment of “looking for Biden” and see how well that first amendment works.
  - FireBeyond 3y ago
    We literally had Trump say of Clinton “I’m not sure what can be done about her, maybe some of you Second Amendment folk can do something”… And it worked very well, because precisely nothing happened.
    - midasuni 3y ago
      https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/world/fbi-shoot-dead-man-accused-of-threatening-us-president-joe-biden/ar-AA1f5l3r https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/world/fbi-shoot-dead-man-accu...
- kypro 3y ago
  I'm very charitable so perhaps that's why we disagree here, but I didn't read his comment as racist personally. That said, I understand the use of the word "monkey" could have been used with racist connotations, but the burden of proof would be on you to proof that instead of assuming guilt. But either way he wasn't charged with being a racist. And outside of being a member of an extremist group I don't believe it's actually illegal to be a racist in the UK. It's illegal to be offensive. And that's what he was ultimately prosecuted for.
tjpnz 3y ago
There was also a well publicised case where a mother was arrested in front of her children after misgendering a trans person on Twitter. The case was eventually thrown out but it seems the UK police have far too much power and flexibility in terms of what they can arrest someone for.
- b112 3y ago
  The true problem is, what offended 20 years ago, does not offend today. And the same is true for 20 years from now! So how do you codify this? Legislation can't have specific words and actions in it, it would be out of date before it became law! So to target "offensive things", depends upon the opinion of the officers, the prosecutor, and so on! And can change at a moments notice! Oh bewoe to thee, which does not watch twitter and be ware of new words this week! Here's an example. Where I grew up, colloquially, women were called 'chicks' and men 'boys'. "What are you chicks/boys up to", one might say. This was used by extreme feminists too, with zero objection. Flash forward a few years, and in a city 1000km away, I started to describe how I was deeply impressed with the clarity of <female author>, she's a chick to watch. Zero offense at home. None. New city? All the women, and some men in the room, went ballistic. Note that: * I was complementing the intellect of a person * The tone and mannerism I used, was as if I said "woman to watch" Point is, a word which was encouraged and approved by feminists I grew up with, used 1000km away in the same province of my country, meant I was an anti-feminist, woman hater. And how do you legislate that?! And... what you say in one place, can be dangerous in another, all with no ill intent!
  - sdfghswe 3y ago
    > The true problem is, what offended 20 years ago, does not offend today. And the same is true for 20 years from now! Just don't make laws apply retroactively. Sounds like a trivial problem with a trivial solution. A woman misgendered etc doesn't matter that it was ok 20 years ago. It's not ok now and she did it now.
    - TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
      Still, it shouldn’t be an offence. You might think your a woman, I might disagree. Can we just agree to disagree? Does anyone need to be charged with a criminal offence over that? If you feel motivated to take female hormones and chop ya dick off, you’ve got problems, but being called a man really isn’t one of the ones worth worry about.
contrarian1234 3y ago
For context, I'm generally sympathetic to the "I've got nothing to hide" people I find your example illustrates the point . The UK has insane libel laws The sane solution would be to address these laws, not to create mechanisms for people to arbitrarily evade laws A lot of pro privacy arguments seem to boil down to "well we should make it a bit easier for people to break the law, cus maybe the laws are just bad". This line of reasoning just feels really unsatisfying..
- simonh 3y ago
  I think we need both. We need clearer and more just laws governing free speech, and we need the right to the protection of our private speech.
  - psd1 3y ago
    > we need You're not wrong, but there are more pressing concerns
    - simonh 3y ago
      The UK passes roughly 33 acts of parliament per year, and 3,000 Statutory Instruments. What other concern is so pressing that passing one act of parliament would render the nation unable to complete it?
- jabradoodle 3y ago
  It doesn't sound like libel/defemtation were involved in either case. Sounds like they were treated as criminal matters.
- rightbyte 3y ago
  > The UK has insane libel laws It is somewhat strange since the tabloids are extremely toxic and spam gossip.
- qerti 3y ago
  “Making it easier for people to break the law” is a weird way of saying “Making it harder for authoritarian governments to abuse its citizens”
TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
Your argument is rendered completely null by your flaccid half-apology at the end. If you have something to say, say it and stand by it, or get out of the way. What offensive language? Monkey? Was the guy black? One does have to admit some darker skinned people do look a little similar to gorillas. So what. That’s not an incitement to violence. And the lesbian cop, she is a lesbian right? Who cares! How is that relevant to anything. A simple “don’t be a bellend” response should have covered it. Sheesh! Some people really just need some bigger problems if the only things they feel motivated to act against is some low level name calling. Toughen up princesses.
ransackdev 3y ago
I think the person who said a kid deserved to die is a pos and he maybe needed his ass beat, but I can’t understand how anyone can be charged with hate speech for talking shit about a dead person. Who’s rights were violated there? Did it get thrown out? Maybe I’m obtuse and such a thing is not out of the ordinary.
- kypro 3y ago
  > Did it get thrown out? No. He pleaded guilty to "sending a communication of an indecent or offensive nature" and was fined accordingly. At the end of the day what he said was indecent and therefore is illegal in the UK. Perhaps he could have fought it, but I believe he would have needed to argue that a reasonable person wouldn't find his comments indecent, and that would probably be difficult. The larger point here is that anyone who gives an opinion online here in the UK is at risk of something similar happening. It depends less on the opinion and far more on the subjective nature of what is and isn't offensive. For example I could say some highly offensive things, but so long as I say them about Nigel Farage or Piers Morgan I'd be unlikely to be charged. I'd argue these laws are very subjectively policed and typically used to against people with political opinions that are not considered "acceptable". For example, it's often used against feminists who argue in favour of women-only spaces since this is considered transphobic and hateful by some.
  - wnoise 3y ago
    You could have said "sex-segregated" instead of "women-only" and not drag in the definitional arguments. Or, at least less so.
- tim333 3y ago
  I guess it could justify killing more of the "Toxteth monkey" lot. These kind of restrictions are quite common re the holocaust and jew killing for fairly obvious reasons.

by kypro 3y ago

_a_a_a_ 3y ago

> It was kinda crazy because "all" he said was that didn't care about a teen who died in police custody, specifically that this teen was a, "good for nothing, spice smoking, Toxteth monkey" " Rowan O’Connell, 23, was hit with a fine by magistrates today over the sick outbust following the death of Mzee, 18. The teenager, described by his mother as a “gentle giant”, died after becoming unwell while detained by police officers at Liverpool ONE in July. O’Connell took to social media website Reddit, where he made baseless allegations, labelling Mzee a “good for nothing, spice smoking, Toxteth monkey”. He added: “As I say, who gives a f**.” " https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/watch-moment-web-troll-who-11918656 https://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/news/liverpool-news/watch-mo... So, Not quite what you said. > or just saying something mildly offensive will often lead to prosecution That's not mild, and you either know it or should know it. > I mean just this week an autistic child got arrested for calling a lesbian police officer a lesbian here in the UK. No link eh? What a surprise. --- edit: this isn't about the rights/wrongs of what was said in this case but your (deliberately?) incomplete description of them. I actually share your concern about freedom of speech but twisting facts doesn't build your case well.

edholland 3y ago
Here's a link to the story about the autistic teen incident https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/police-arrest-autistic-teenager-lesbian-b2391381.html https://www.independent.co.uk/tv/news/police-arrest-autistic...
dbsmith83 3y ago
> He added: “As I say, who gives a f***.” (sic) I don't understand your point. You both said the exact same thing: "good for nothing, spice smoking, Toxteth monkey", except you also said the guy added "Who gives a fuck?" which basically means "who cares?". Does adding a "who cares?" make the originally phrase much different?

barrysteve 3y ago

I wouldn't annoy a police officer before the Pan-Opticon was installed anyway. When a Cop in the 90s arrests a guy because the cop got annoyed at something the 'suspect' said, you had the option to blame it on the cop's thin-skinned personality. Now annoyed cops can use the law directly. The UK police implicitly allowing retributive online abuse is subtly humorous.

sacrosancty 3y ago

[dead]

bemusedthrow75 3y ago

> Insulting people online or just saying something mildly offensive will often lead to prosecution. "will often": no, not at all. Could occasionally. You're not helping your argument by overstating this. The courts are not stuffed with people being fined for saying things that are "mildly offensive". And nothing of what you're talking about is government surveillance. The police aren't the government, and the police do not routinely surveil the populace. They wouldn't have the staff, for one thing! The police actually wanted to close the police station in the town in which I live -- population over 100,000 in the wider borough -- and replace it with what amounted to a kiosk and service from police stations five miles away in each direction. And yes, really: for those viewers who persist in believing that the surveillance system in Hot Fuzz exists in reality... nope

ekianjo 3y ago
> The police aren't the government, The police is the dog of the government. What difference does it make to you if the dog or the master attacks you?
- bemusedthrow75 3y ago
  I understand that in the simplest way this is true, and I am sure it is very clever, poetic and pithy. But this is not how it works in principle or in practice in the UK. The police work on behalf of the people, not the government. When government manages to suborn the police in even a small way it is very much noticed. It’s difficult for people outside the UK to see this, I suppose, but our experience with this is that state directed police overreach is now unusual, and there is a lot of pushback from the chief police officers and the public when they are asked to oppress. There are aberrations (no police force in the world gets protest management right, and ours is no exception) but in general you have to be consciously right up in their faces to cause such an aberration. The UK is a country of realpolitik at every level. The police go about their business unarmed, with the consent of the population, and generally speaking, they know the public will not put up with overreach anymore. We may find them pompous and overbearing but they are pretty much the envy of the world still.

version_five 3y ago

There's two separate issues here. Privacy should be a right, I agree. But also we shouldn't tolerate our countries becoming authoritarian police states. It's already happened in the UK early, Australia and Canada are well on the way, and the US isn't far behind. Good privacy as a substitute for a government that isn't batshit crazy is not going to work in any event. Advocate privacy, but also advocate not letting giving power to insane elements of our society like this.

bemusedthrow75 3y ago
I find this notion that the UK is a police state quite hilarious. Ours is not the country where the police bring guns to seemingly every minor dispute and fairly often draw them. Ours is not the country where police kill you for resisting arrest, stand by while your kids are murdered in a school, or seize your money out on border roads without needing cause. Ours is not the country with a toxic plea bargaining system that throws the book routinely and a 90% conviction rate, or prosecutors who run for election on promises to be ever tougher. Ours is not the country with three strikes laws, death penalties, tent prisons run by fascist antiheroes, rampantly profiteering private prisons, corrupt local sheriffs, newspapers getting raided when they investigate the local police chief, Stand Your Ground and SWATting. Yeah. We overpolice people being rude. It matters when you have the equivalent of one fifth of the population of the USA crammed into a country a bit smaller than Michigan. Batshit crazy is clearly subjective, right? Try looking at things from a different perspective.
- ekianjo 3y ago
  If its not a police state why do you need widespread videocamera surveillance? Seems like you have an arbitrary definition of what a police state should be. If the police just needs to take interest in you to find something to jail you because you are breaking hundreds of laws everyday anyway, this is a police state.
  - bemusedthrow75 3y ago
    We don’t really have it in the way people in the US and those places influenced by their perception have come to believe. My experience is that US people tend to think that the police can follow you all over the place in real time using cameras. They cannot. They might be able to get the legal right to CCTV footage of all sorts of cameras but they will have to have the paperwork and knock on doors, not unlike the way they could in the USA. This is regulated by law. Government and the police owns surprisingly little of the cameras in the UK. The vast majority are in private hands, and there is no “network” of them. Basically this perception of CCTV in the UK is unfounded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_United_Kingdom#Number_of_cameras https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mass_surveillance_in_the_Unite... > If the police just needs to take interest in you to find something to jail you because you are breaking hundreds of laws everyday anyway, this is a police state Then the UK is not one, because this is your imagination. It bears no resemblance to the reality of life in the UK. It sounds like a closer fit for the plea bargain culture of the USA. Plea bargains are not a general part of our judicial process or culture. So if the government wants to use the threat of a dozen other violations to make you talk, they will have to get the CPS to take them to trial, because as a general rule the system does not allow you to be pressured into pleading guilty on something else in return. Our system has a much lower conviction rate. I do not, in fact, have an arbitrary definition of what a police state is. But this is the point. US commentators define “police state” to mean something narrow that does not overlap with the justice and incarceration culture of the USA, which has more police corruption than most of the developed world, and which is more unequally applied than most.

fsckboy 3y ago

> I learnt of a case just this week where a guy on Reddit left a slightly controversial comment and ended up being charged with hate speech, lost his job and received hate abuse online for his opinion. the guy publically posted a racist comment in the UK where there is not an unlimited right of free speech and anti-social behavior is regulated. I don't see the privacy concern. I prefer an unlimited right of free speech, but I don't call it privacy. This guy did have something to hide, shoulda kept it hidden.

midasuni 3y ago
Where does have an unlimited right of free speech? Because once you start threatening politicians in the US see how far it gets you. Post a picture of yourself with an AR15 and a comment of “looking for Biden” and see how well that first amendment works.
- FireBeyond 3y ago
  We literally had Trump say of Clinton “I’m not sure what can be done about her, maybe some of you Second Amendment folk can do something”… And it worked very well, because precisely nothing happened.
  - midasuni 3y ago
    https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/world/fbi-shoot-dead-man-accused-of-threatening-us-president-joe-biden/ar-AA1f5l3r https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/world/fbi-shoot-dead-man-accu...
kypro 3y ago
I'm very charitable so perhaps that's why we disagree here, but I didn't read his comment as racist personally. That said, I understand the use of the word "monkey" could have been used with racist connotations, but the burden of proof would be on you to proof that instead of assuming guilt. But either way he wasn't charged with being a racist. And outside of being a member of an extremist group I don't believe it's actually illegal to be a racist in the UK. It's illegal to be offensive. And that's what he was ultimately prosecuted for.

tjpnz 3y ago

There was also a well publicised case where a mother was arrested in front of her children after misgendering a trans person on Twitter. The case was eventually thrown out but it seems the UK police have far too much power and flexibility in terms of what they can arrest someone for.

b112 3y ago
The true problem is, what offended 20 years ago, does not offend today. And the same is true for 20 years from now! So how do you codify this? Legislation can't have specific words and actions in it, it would be out of date before it became law! So to target "offensive things", depends upon the opinion of the officers, the prosecutor, and so on! And can change at a moments notice! Oh bewoe to thee, which does not watch twitter and be ware of new words this week! Here's an example. Where I grew up, colloquially, women were called 'chicks' and men 'boys'. "What are you chicks/boys up to", one might say. This was used by extreme feminists too, with zero objection. Flash forward a few years, and in a city 1000km away, I started to describe how I was deeply impressed with the clarity of <female author>, she's a chick to watch. Zero offense at home. None. New city? All the women, and some men in the room, went ballistic. Note that: * I was complementing the intellect of a person * The tone and mannerism I used, was as if I said "woman to watch" Point is, a word which was encouraged and approved by feminists I grew up with, used 1000km away in the same province of my country, meant I was an anti-feminist, woman hater. And how do you legislate that?! And... what you say in one place, can be dangerous in another, all with no ill intent!
- sdfghswe 3y ago
  > The true problem is, what offended 20 years ago, does not offend today. And the same is true for 20 years from now! Just don't make laws apply retroactively. Sounds like a trivial problem with a trivial solution. A woman misgendered etc doesn't matter that it was ok 20 years ago. It's not ok now and she did it now.
  - TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago
    Still, it shouldn’t be an offence. You might think your a woman, I might disagree. Can we just agree to disagree? Does anyone need to be charged with a criminal offence over that? If you feel motivated to take female hormones and chop ya dick off, you’ve got problems, but being called a man really isn’t one of the ones worth worry about.

contrarian1234 3y ago

For context, I'm generally sympathetic to the "I've got nothing to hide" people I find your example illustrates the point . The UK has insane libel laws The sane solution would be to address these laws, not to create mechanisms for people to arbitrarily evade laws A lot of pro privacy arguments seem to boil down to "well we should make it a bit easier for people to break the law, cus maybe the laws are just bad". This line of reasoning just feels really unsatisfying..

simonh 3y ago
I think we need both. We need clearer and more just laws governing free speech, and we need the right to the protection of our private speech.
- psd1 3y ago
  > we need You're not wrong, but there are more pressing concerns
  - simonh 3y ago
    The UK passes roughly 33 acts of parliament per year, and 3,000 Statutory Instruments. What other concern is so pressing that passing one act of parliament would render the nation unable to complete it?
jabradoodle 3y ago
It doesn't sound like libel/defemtation were involved in either case. Sounds like they were treated as criminal matters.
rightbyte 3y ago
> The UK has insane libel laws It is somewhat strange since the tabloids are extremely toxic and spam gossip.
qerti 3y ago
“Making it easier for people to break the law” is a weird way of saying “Making it harder for authoritarian governments to abuse its citizens”

TheSpiceIsLife 3y ago

Your argument is rendered completely null by your flaccid half-apology at the end. If you have something to say, say it and stand by it, or get out of the way. What offensive language? Monkey? Was the guy black? One does have to admit some darker skinned people do look a little similar to gorillas. So what. That’s not an incitement to violence. And the lesbian cop, she is a lesbian right? Who cares! How is that relevant to anything. A simple “don’t be a bellend” response should have covered it. Sheesh! Some people really just need some bigger problems if the only things they feel motivated to act against is some low level name calling. Toughen up princesses.

ransackdev 3y ago

I think the person who said a kid deserved to die is a pos and he maybe needed his ass beat, but I can’t understand how anyone can be charged with hate speech for talking shit about a dead person. Who’s rights were violated there? Did it get thrown out? Maybe I’m obtuse and such a thing is not out of the ordinary.

kypro 3y ago
> Did it get thrown out? No. He pleaded guilty to "sending a communication of an indecent or offensive nature" and was fined accordingly. At the end of the day what he said was indecent and therefore is illegal in the UK. Perhaps he could have fought it, but I believe he would have needed to argue that a reasonable person wouldn't find his comments indecent, and that would probably be difficult. The larger point here is that anyone who gives an opinion online here in the UK is at risk of something similar happening. It depends less on the opinion and far more on the subjective nature of what is and isn't offensive. For example I could say some highly offensive things, but so long as I say them about Nigel Farage or Piers Morgan I'd be unlikely to be charged. I'd argue these laws are very subjectively policed and typically used to against people with political opinions that are not considered "acceptable". For example, it's often used against feminists who argue in favour of women-only spaces since this is considered transphobic and hateful by some.
- wnoise 3y ago
  You could have said "sex-segregated" instead of "women-only" and not drag in the definitional arguments. Or, at least less so.
tim333 3y ago
I guess it could justify killing more of the "Toxteth monkey" lot. These kind of restrictions are quite common re the holocaust and jew killing for fairly obvious reasons.