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Nothing actually happened to the guy with the blank sheet of paper (or at least, if it did, that’s not reported in the article). Certainly you can find example
by foldr 2y ago
Nothing actually happened to the guy with the blank sheet of paper (or at least, if it did, that’s not reported in the article).
Certainly you can find examples of the British police overpolicing protests, and that’s something that people rightly get angry about. It’s just that there’s a huge distance between that kind of thing (which happens pretty much everywhere from time to time - do US police forces have an exemplary record of policing protests?) and the kind of wild claims you can see in this discussion that the UK has become an Orwellian police state.
- impossiblefork 2y agoPerhaps, but I am not comparing it to American forces. I'm Swedish and while I have some things to do with America, mostly indirectly, it's not my centre of reference.
- hnlmorg 2y agoSweden’s got its own fair share of problems at the moment too. Arguments around citizenship. Problems with gun violence (which the UK and most of countries solved decades ago). It’s not like you couldn’t draw a Mad Max parallel just by looking at the headlines in Swedish news.
- kennysoona 2y ago> the kind of wild claims you can see in this discussion that the UK has become an Orwellian police state. It feels like it's always slowly getting closer to that. It certainly seems one of the least free developed or 'allied' countries.
- hnlmorg 2y agoEvery country is moving in that direction. Thats just how politics is shifting at the moment. I’m not happy about it but you can’t really single the UK out for it.
- kennysoona 2y agoIt feels like the UK is in many ways leading the charge, though. The only other country that would be a contender is Australia. It was the UK for example that introduced that barbarian law that conceivably allows imprisoning people that genuinely forget the passwords to their encrypted volumes, and that was I think over a decade ago.
- foldr 2y agoHow many people have been imprisoned for that? If we’ve had a decade of being an Orwellian police state, it should be quite a few people, no?
- kennysoona 2y agoThe fact that you have the law itself is pretty troubling. And some of the protestors at the coronation of Charles were pretty blatant. And all the examples of police showing up because of a tweet, often not even hateful just not falling in line sufficiently with rightthink.
- foldr 2y agoLots of things are troubling. I am complaining about wild exaggerations, not saying that there is nothing to worry about or that the UK is perfect. Unfortunately a lot of people are getting their news from Twitter, from accounts that are obsessed with painting a particular picture of the UK. Have you spent any time in the UK yourself? The impression of it that you’d get from reading HN is unrecognizable to anyone who lives here.
- kennysoona 2y agoI don't disagree that there are wild exaggerations being made, my point was just that the UK seems further along the path than its peers. > Have you spent any time in the UK yourself? The impression of it that you’d get from reading HN is unrecognizable to anyone who lives here. I lived in Scotland for a while and have been to London often enough. It's it's mostly just a normal country, but things can change slowly until all of a sudden it's unavoidable. The cops showing up to peoples houses for opinions tweets is certainly frequent and concerning.