5 ms·

- Heavy censorship - Two-tier justice system - This How did it come to this? The UK is arguably the country that has done the most for the cause of freedom,

- Heavy censorship - Two-tier justice system - This How did it come to this? The UK is arguably the country that has done the most for the cause of freedom, having led the way in abolishing slavery.

mmikeff 4mo ago
Can we stop it with this two tier justice system nonsense?
- kaliqt 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - mmikeff 4mo ago
    It's not a fact at all, it's a lie spread by people who want to stoke anger for their own benefit.
    - skippyboxedhero 4mo ago
      https://x.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1270374388488167428?lang=en https://x.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1270374388488167428?lang=e...
      - trumpdong 4mo ago
        Are we just posting irrelevant links? https://thedailywtf.com/ https://thedailywtf.com/
      - croes 4mo ago
        And? Being against anti-black racism doesn’t mean pro-white racism. Have you looked up what all those claiming racism against white people said when the victim of a mistake of an police officer was non-white?
        skippyboxedhero 4mo ago
        You haven't even begun to understand people who disagree with you. If you believe that what happened to George Floyd was bad, you would also believe that what happened to Nowak was bad. Saying that being appalled by police brutality towards a white person is "racism" misunderstands what people are saying complextely. You are arguing with phantoms in your head. The problem that people have is that whilst America was ripping itself apart with riots, British politicians were enthusiastically supporting this. Starmer made a statement saying he stood with the rioters. The same thing happened in the UK, there was a brief riot, and Starmer has taken the complete opposite position...and today, actually complained about people in other countries "stoking up division" (this is something that is getting said every few days). The UK has policing policies and laws which favour some groups in society, this event was the outcome of that. When this happened in the US, the same politicians were outraged, appalled, disgusted. When this happened in the UK, no issues with policing at all. The problem that people have is that this is obviously contradictatory...again, if you start from the basis that people should be treated equally (which many people in the UK do not).
        akimbostrawman 4mo ago
        >If you believe that what happened to George Floyd was bad, you would also believe that what happened to Nowak was bad except Nowak has never done a crime such as robbing a pregnant women with a knife or overdosed on drugs leading to his death.
        croes 4mo ago
        Except George Floyd was the last case in a long list of police brutality against black people. How many cases like Nowak‘s where before his? Seems like right wingers have a really short temper if they aren’t ok with the victims skin color. Reminds me of anti vaxxers who cry murder if they can remotely link a death to a vaccine side effect but happily ignore thousands of death from COVID.
        akimbostrawman 4mo ago
  - unfitted2545 4mo ago
    How many chief constables aren't white? Cognitive dissonance isn't a fact
    - skippyboxedhero 4mo ago
      You will need to explain this in more detail so people without racial prejudice can understand why someone's race impacts their ability to do a certain job. If they were not white, you would still have to claim there is discrimination? Or do you believe that non whites are inherently better at policing? Unclear. Also, in the UK there has been central directives to discriminate in favour of ethnic minorities for nearly three decades, discrimination is part of policing policy, there is an extensive body of training given to police to effectuate that (and that extends beyond policing into the court system).
      - lwhi 4mo ago
        It's really not that complicated. If we have fewer non-white police officers, our ability to keep the whole of our (gratefully diverse) population safe is at a disadvantage. We need a police force that accurately represents the full range of diversity in our country. Occasionally members of the police force will f*k up badly. This is a fact. In the case of Henry Nowak, a police officer made an incredibly bad call and this added to Novak's tragic passing. The misdemeanor associated with one person does not mean that our diverse society should be made less diverse. The very fact that people like you are calling for this type of change is ignorant, opportunistic and frankly wrong. I will not stand for it.
        skippyboxedhero 4mo ago
        No-one cares about your opinion (or mine). You have misunderstood my point entirely. Being non-white does not mean they are able to do their job better. That is a racist belief. The police in this case were white. But they were acting on policies which require them to treat non-white members of the public differently. It is nothing to do with diversity. Unless you are a racist, diversity is not an end in itself. No-one is making self-important statements about changing society. They just want the police to do their job correctly. If someone is stabbed, they shouldn't arrest them because their policy dictates that non-whites are rarely suspects in crimes. The peak of luxury beliefs is to believe that people performing vital jobs that may involve life or death should perform that job in a way to achieve abstract social goals in order to make individuals feel better about "society".
- userbinator 4mo ago
  Two words: Henry Nowak.
  - lwhi 4mo ago
    [flagged]
    - logicchains 4mo ago
      The bodycam literally shows a police officer responding to a man who's been stabbed with "I don't think you have mate", just because his killer said the man was racist.
      - lwhi 4mo ago
        I'll make this simple for you. The behaviour of one officer does not mean that we should no longer live in a diverse society. This is one incident. The officer is question made a terrible call. The fact that people like you are using this as ammunition to further frankly racist aims, is an egregious afront to everyone living in the UK.
        b65e8bee43c2ed0 4mo ago
        [flagged]
        lwhi 4mo ago
        You are simply racist.
        b65e8bee43c2ed0 4mo ago
        [flagged]
        tomhow 4mo ago
- 243341286 4mo ago
  [dead]
- GlacierFox 4mo ago
  [flagged]
- fer 4mo ago
  I wouldn't call it two-tier justice, because generally the courts do the right thing, but there's a shamefully obvious two-tier policing. From the Jay Report [0] showing crimes swept under the rug according to ethnic/socioeconomic background of perp and victim, to arresting people for opposing genocide (sorry: terrorism!) [1] to the recent case of Henry Nowak [2], it's really hard not to see a two-tier policing in the UK. And this very submission; caring about privacy is seen grounds for being reported and potentially investigated, by a private company! Which suggests it's something already internalized, too, for people who resist big corp surveillance. Back in the 90s and before, the two-tier heavily punished the minorities, and in an overshooting overcorrection, now it's the other way around. Nowak getting handcuffed by cops going "I don't think you have [been stabbed] mate!" says it all. Unless it's regarding opposing/supporting Israel, then the two-tier flips and people with basic human decency and actual antisemites are pigeonholed together, nevermind their background. [0] https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/279/independent-inquiry-into-child-sexual-exploitation-in-rotherham https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/279/independent-... [1] https://newint.org/action/2025/i-oppose-genocide-ok https://newint.org/action/2025/i-oppose-genocide-ok [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Henry_Nowak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Henry_Nowak
  - foldr 4mo ago
    The Palestine Action ban was overturned by the courts. And putting this together with the Nowak case leads to an almost contradictory position. Whatever the issues with police handling of pro-Palestinian protestors, they're not instances of what the far right would call two-tier policing (i.e. the bogus claim that the police treat white people more harshly than other ethnic groups). For example, here is a poster who' all over this thread complaining about two-tier policing, but who supports the ban on PA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48155504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48155504 The more nuanced reality is that the police are extremely imperfect and treat all sorts of different groups of people unfairly in all sorts of different ways. That's indeed a problem, but it's not a political conspiracy.
    - trumpdong 4mo ago
      The police are ignoring the courts and still arresting people for protesting PA.
- foldr 4mo ago
  There's a thought experiment in the philosophy of mind where your brain is gradually replaced, neuron by neuron, with artificial units that replicate the exact input and output mappings of the original neurons. The question, of course, is whether this change is accompanied by any change in your subjective conscious experience. I notice that a variant of this experiment is now playing out on HN in real time, with various commenters having their neuronal mappings gradually reshaped to match activation layers trained on Elon Musk's twitter feed. A few years ago it was possible to have conversations about the UK on HN. Now all you can really do is get into pointless arguments with biological instantiations of Grok. Unfortunately, there are vastly more people outside the UK consuming this nonsense than there are British people who can flag it or correct it. So in contrast to conversations about the US, it is very hard for perspectives grounded in reality to break through. If you look into it, the vast majority of the users stirring things up in this thread aren't in Britain, and most likely have little to no first-hand knowledge of what the country is like.
  - trumpdong 4mo ago
    Very true, but not really related to the thought experiment you mentioned since that one doesn't change the behavior of each neuron.
- snvzz 4mo ago
  This[0] is what the UK has come to be. 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csBnAX6yS-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csBnAX6yS-U
youngNed 4mo ago
Eric Williams: “British historians write almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it.
- throwfaraway135 4mo ago
  Totally agree, the British Empire has a lot of blood on its hand, but compared to its forebears and contemporaries it did abolish slavery, a tradition that has roots as old as humanity itself.
  - youngNed 4mo ago
    Compared to its contemporaries, only Portugal transported more African slaves across to the America's. But hey, they stopped doing it, after a couple hundred years so let's everyone give Britain credit.
    - throwfaraway135 4mo ago
      There were times when there were more slaves in Athens than citizens. The Arab led slave trade flourished for much longer, by some records it is alive even today. The words Slav and slave have the same root. There were times when 30-40% of the Korean population were slaves. The Mongols killed and enslaved half of the known world.
      - youngNed 4mo ago
        I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here. My point is this, none of these people ever make a point of how much freedom they had, because after a couple hundred years they stopped, quite like the the brits like to. It's pretty baffling tbh. Anyone: criticises the British empire. Brits: after several hundred years of brutal trans Atlantic slave trade, we stopped. Hurrah!
        jadamson 4mo ago
yubblegum 4mo ago
> the country that has done the most for the cause of freedom Need a history refresher. Let's skip the Magna Carta since that was really about giving power to feudal lords. Do you mean British empire being the unwitting and unwilling cause of United States? When, in God's green Earth, have the "lords" that lord it over the "subjects of crown" common people of that island have been vanguards of "freedom" when it did not serve their own class interests?
- croes 4mo ago
  Have you read parent‘s comment until the end? > having led the way in abolishing slavery
  - yubblegum 4mo ago
    Oh, I missed that "let us now, assembled noble lords, end this abominable institution through which we have become filthy rich. And my lords, what say ye regarding pushing drugs to the wretches of Asia?" As they like to say in England, bullocks!
    - croes 4mo ago
      So you can’t do a good thing just because you do other bad things? So you must be either a saint (who also did a lit of bad things) or the devil himself (who punishes bad people). You could just simply acknowledge the fact that Britain was one of the first major powers to abolish slave trade and later slavery across its empire, and it actively pushed other countries to follow.
      - yubblegum 4mo ago
        >> the country that has done the most for the cause of freedom That is the claim that has been challenged by many here. It's just too much, and I am not even Irish ..
        croes 4mo ago
wongarsu 4mo ago
There is a reason both 1984 and V for Vendetta are set in the UK Though the slide ever since Brexit is indeed astounding
- fidotron 4mo ago
  For whatever reason the British underappreciate Brave New World.
- joe463369 4mo ago
  Yes, they were both written by British people.
photios 4mo ago
> How did it come to this? Trying not to get my account banned... The British elite allied with non-British people and betrayed their own.
- youngNed 4mo ago
  Exactly this. But unfortunately this is all causing quite the distraction into those foreign crypto donations
- trumpdong 4mo ago
  photios is being racist against immigrants in case anyone didn't catch his meaning. He's saying the elites are betraying Britain's racial purity
  - photios 4mo ago
    "Everyone I don't agree with is Hitler" is not an argument.
zelphirkalt 4mo ago
The UK is historically a very bad example, especially as a colonizer. It has basically invented concentration camps before the Nazis, in Africa, and if we get to the opium war, the picture does not get much better either. Almost everywhere they went they engaged in hideous despicable crimes. If they have done most for the cause of freedom, then they have also done a much higher amount for non-freedom and slavery.

- Heavy censorship - Two-tier justice system - This How did it come to this? The UK is arguably the country that has done the most for the cause of freedom, having led the way in abolishing slavery.

mmikeff 4mo ago

Can we stop it with this two tier justice system nonsense?

kaliqt 4mo ago
[flagged]
- mmikeff 4mo ago
  It's not a fact at all, it's a lie spread by people who want to stoke anger for their own benefit.
  - skippyboxedhero 4mo ago
    https://x.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1270374388488167428?lang=en https://x.com/Keir_Starmer/status/1270374388488167428?lang=e...
    - trumpdong 4mo ago
      Are we just posting irrelevant links? https://thedailywtf.com/ https://thedailywtf.com/
    - croes 4mo ago
      And? Being against anti-black racism doesn’t mean pro-white racism. Have you looked up what all those claiming racism against white people said when the victim of a mistake of an police officer was non-white?
      - skippyboxedhero 4mo ago
        You haven't even begun to understand people who disagree with you. If you believe that what happened to George Floyd was bad, you would also believe that what happened to Nowak was bad. Saying that being appalled by police brutality towards a white person is "racism" misunderstands what people are saying complextely. You are arguing with phantoms in your head. The problem that people have is that whilst America was ripping itself apart with riots, British politicians were enthusiastically supporting this. Starmer made a statement saying he stood with the rioters. The same thing happened in the UK, there was a brief riot, and Starmer has taken the complete opposite position...and today, actually complained about people in other countries "stoking up division" (this is something that is getting said every few days). The UK has policing policies and laws which favour some groups in society, this event was the outcome of that. When this happened in the US, the same politicians were outraged, appalled, disgusted. When this happened in the UK, no issues with policing at all. The problem that people have is that this is obviously contradictatory...again, if you start from the basis that people should be treated equally (which many people in the UK do not).
        akimbostrawman 4mo ago
        >If you believe that what happened to George Floyd was bad, you would also believe that what happened to Nowak was bad except Nowak has never done a crime such as robbing a pregnant women with a knife or overdosed on drugs leading to his death.
        croes 4mo ago
        Except George Floyd was the last case in a long list of police brutality against black people. How many cases like Nowak‘s where before his? Seems like right wingers have a really short temper if they aren’t ok with the victims skin color. Reminds me of anti vaxxers who cry murder if they can remotely link a death to a vaccine side effect but happily ignore thousands of death from COVID.
        akimbostrawman 4mo ago
- unfitted2545 4mo ago
  How many chief constables aren't white? Cognitive dissonance isn't a fact
  - skippyboxedhero 4mo ago
    You will need to explain this in more detail so people without racial prejudice can understand why someone's race impacts their ability to do a certain job. If they were not white, you would still have to claim there is discrimination? Or do you believe that non whites are inherently better at policing? Unclear. Also, in the UK there has been central directives to discriminate in favour of ethnic minorities for nearly three decades, discrimination is part of policing policy, there is an extensive body of training given to police to effectuate that (and that extends beyond policing into the court system).
    - lwhi 4mo ago
      It's really not that complicated. If we have fewer non-white police officers, our ability to keep the whole of our (gratefully diverse) population safe is at a disadvantage. We need a police force that accurately represents the full range of diversity in our country. Occasionally members of the police force will f*k up badly. This is a fact. In the case of Henry Nowak, a police officer made an incredibly bad call and this added to Novak's tragic passing. The misdemeanor associated with one person does not mean that our diverse society should be made less diverse. The very fact that people like you are calling for this type of change is ignorant, opportunistic and frankly wrong. I will not stand for it.
      - skippyboxedhero 4mo ago
        No-one cares about your opinion (or mine). You have misunderstood my point entirely. Being non-white does not mean they are able to do their job better. That is a racist belief. The police in this case were white. But they were acting on policies which require them to treat non-white members of the public differently. It is nothing to do with diversity. Unless you are a racist, diversity is not an end in itself. No-one is making self-important statements about changing society. They just want the police to do their job correctly. If someone is stabbed, they shouldn't arrest them because their policy dictates that non-whites are rarely suspects in crimes. The peak of luxury beliefs is to believe that people performing vital jobs that may involve life or death should perform that job in a way to achieve abstract social goals in order to make individuals feel better about "society".
userbinator 4mo ago
Two words: Henry Nowak.
- lwhi 4mo ago
  [flagged]
  - logicchains 4mo ago
    The bodycam literally shows a police officer responding to a man who's been stabbed with "I don't think you have mate", just because his killer said the man was racist.
    - lwhi 4mo ago
      I'll make this simple for you. The behaviour of one officer does not mean that we should no longer live in a diverse society. This is one incident. The officer is question made a terrible call. The fact that people like you are using this as ammunition to further frankly racist aims, is an egregious afront to everyone living in the UK.
      - b65e8bee43c2ed0 4mo ago
        [flagged]
        lwhi 4mo ago
        You are simply racist.
        b65e8bee43c2ed0 4mo ago
        [flagged]
        tomhow 4mo ago
243341286 4mo ago
[dead]
GlacierFox 4mo ago
[flagged]
fer 4mo ago
I wouldn't call it two-tier justice, because generally the courts do the right thing, but there's a shamefully obvious two-tier policing. From the Jay Report [0] showing crimes swept under the rug according to ethnic/socioeconomic background of perp and victim, to arresting people for opposing genocide (sorry: terrorism!) [1] to the recent case of Henry Nowak [2], it's really hard not to see a two-tier policing in the UK. And this very submission; caring about privacy is seen grounds for being reported and potentially investigated, by a private company! Which suggests it's something already internalized, too, for people who resist big corp surveillance. Back in the 90s and before, the two-tier heavily punished the minorities, and in an overshooting overcorrection, now it's the other way around. Nowak getting handcuffed by cops going "I don't think you have [been stabbed] mate!" says it all. Unless it's regarding opposing/supporting Israel, then the two-tier flips and people with basic human decency and actual antisemites are pigeonholed together, nevermind their background. [0] https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/279/independent-inquiry-into-child-sexual-exploitation-in-rotherham https://www.rotherham.gov.uk/downloads/file/279/independent-... [1] https://newint.org/action/2025/i-oppose-genocide-ok https://newint.org/action/2025/i-oppose-genocide-ok [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Henry_Nowak https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Murder_of_Henry_Nowak
- foldr 4mo ago
  The Palestine Action ban was overturned by the courts. And putting this together with the Nowak case leads to an almost contradictory position. Whatever the issues with police handling of pro-Palestinian protestors, they're not instances of what the far right would call two-tier policing (i.e. the bogus claim that the police treat white people more harshly than other ethnic groups). For example, here is a poster who' all over this thread complaining about two-tier policing, but who supports the ban on PA: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48155504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48155504 The more nuanced reality is that the police are extremely imperfect and treat all sorts of different groups of people unfairly in all sorts of different ways. That's indeed a problem, but it's not a political conspiracy.
  - trumpdong 4mo ago
    The police are ignoring the courts and still arresting people for protesting PA.
foldr 4mo ago
There's a thought experiment in the philosophy of mind where your brain is gradually replaced, neuron by neuron, with artificial units that replicate the exact input and output mappings of the original neurons. The question, of course, is whether this change is accompanied by any change in your subjective conscious experience. I notice that a variant of this experiment is now playing out on HN in real time, with various commenters having their neuronal mappings gradually reshaped to match activation layers trained on Elon Musk's twitter feed. A few years ago it was possible to have conversations about the UK on HN. Now all you can really do is get into pointless arguments with biological instantiations of Grok. Unfortunately, there are vastly more people outside the UK consuming this nonsense than there are British people who can flag it or correct it. So in contrast to conversations about the US, it is very hard for perspectives grounded in reality to break through. If you look into it, the vast majority of the users stirring things up in this thread aren't in Britain, and most likely have little to no first-hand knowledge of what the country is like.
- trumpdong 4mo ago
  Very true, but not really related to the thought experiment you mentioned since that one doesn't change the behavior of each neuron.
snvzz 4mo ago
This[0] is what the UK has come to be. 0. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csBnAX6yS-U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=csBnAX6yS-U

youngNed 4mo ago

Eric Williams: “British historians write almost as if Britain had introduced Negro slavery solely for the satisfaction of abolishing it.

throwfaraway135 4mo ago
Totally agree, the British Empire has a lot of blood on its hand, but compared to its forebears and contemporaries it did abolish slavery, a tradition that has roots as old as humanity itself.
- youngNed 4mo ago
  Compared to its contemporaries, only Portugal transported more African slaves across to the America's. But hey, they stopped doing it, after a couple hundred years so let's everyone give Britain credit.
  - throwfaraway135 4mo ago
    There were times when there were more slaves in Athens than citizens. The Arab led slave trade flourished for much longer, by some records it is alive even today. The words Slav and slave have the same root. There were times when 30-40% of the Korean population were slaves. The Mongols killed and enslaved half of the known world.
    - youngNed 4mo ago
      I'm not sure what point you are trying to make here. My point is this, none of these people ever make a point of how much freedom they had, because after a couple hundred years they stopped, quite like the the brits like to. It's pretty baffling tbh. Anyone: criticises the British empire. Brits: after several hundred years of brutal trans Atlantic slave trade, we stopped. Hurrah!
      - jadamson 4mo ago

yubblegum 4mo ago

> the country that has done the most for the cause of freedom Need a history refresher. Let's skip the Magna Carta since that was really about giving power to feudal lords. Do you mean British empire being the unwitting and unwilling cause of United States? When, in God's green Earth, have the "lords" that lord it over the "subjects of crown" common people of that island have been vanguards of "freedom" when it did not serve their own class interests?

croes 4mo ago
Have you read parent‘s comment until the end? > having led the way in abolishing slavery
- yubblegum 4mo ago
  Oh, I missed that "let us now, assembled noble lords, end this abominable institution through which we have become filthy rich. And my lords, what say ye regarding pushing drugs to the wretches of Asia?" As they like to say in England, bullocks!
  - croes 4mo ago
    So you can’t do a good thing just because you do other bad things? So you must be either a saint (who also did a lit of bad things) or the devil himself (who punishes bad people). You could just simply acknowledge the fact that Britain was one of the first major powers to abolish slave trade and later slavery across its empire, and it actively pushed other countries to follow.
    - yubblegum 4mo ago
      >> the country that has done the most for the cause of freedom That is the claim that has been challenged by many here. It's just too much, and I am not even Irish ..
      - croes 4mo ago

wongarsu 4mo ago

There is a reason both 1984 and V for Vendetta are set in the UK Though the slide ever since Brexit is indeed astounding

fidotron 4mo ago
For whatever reason the British underappreciate Brave New World.
joe463369 4mo ago
Yes, they were both written by British people.

photios 4mo ago

> How did it come to this? Trying not to get my account banned... The British elite allied with non-British people and betrayed their own.

youngNed 4mo ago
Exactly this. But unfortunately this is all causing quite the distraction into those foreign crypto donations
trumpdong 4mo ago
photios is being racist against immigrants in case anyone didn't catch his meaning. He's saying the elites are betraying Britain's racial purity
- photios 4mo ago
  "Everyone I don't agree with is Hitler" is not an argument.

zelphirkalt 4mo ago

The UK is historically a very bad example, especially as a colonizer. It has basically invented concentration camps before the Nazis, in Africa, and if we get to the opium war, the picture does not get much better either. Almost everywhere they went they engaged in hideous despicable crimes. If they have done most for the cause of freedom, then they have also done a much higher amount for non-freedom and slavery.