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Nevertheless, he was very clearly talking about prosecuting people for the crime of "inciting" people to commit crimes by posting online.

Right - and that's illegal in the USA, so collaborating with US law enforcement shouldn't surprise you.

He's talking about prosecuting people for expressing opinions online or calling for actions that rile up other people or encourage them to commit crimes.

I don't understand your point. Like I said, if people committed crimes in the UK, then fucked off and carried on committing crimes in other countries, typically those two countries will work together to track the individual down and have them face the consequences. I'm not sure why you're saying this all serious-like: No, I'm not misreading this, I'm not taking it out of context, law enforcement really do be enforcing laws. Chilling stuff.

There are at least three people who have been punished for this already.

Right. But that's identical to the USA. I don't understand how you're only now discovering that inciting violence is not acceptable in the West.

Some pertinent quotes from your first example:

Quote

Jordan Parlour, 28, was jailed for 20 months after pleading guilty to inciting racial hatred with Facebook posts in which he advocated an attack on a hotel in Leeds as part of the violent public disorder that swept England last week.

Quote

In Northampton, Tyler Kay, 26, was given three years and two months in prison for posts on X that called for mass deportation and for people to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers.

For what it's worth, I'd strongly suggest not posting "Dagnabbit, those there immigrant hotels, we should burn these sonovaguns down! Come join me on <date> at <time>! Load my guns and horn my swaggle, we're goin' a' killin' tonight!" It's not gonna go well for you.

Also, out of curiosity - do you know who Wayne O’Rourke is, or did you just bring him up because you thought the short article supported your position?

I wish I could find more timely examples, but there's a guy who dressed his dog up as a Nazi

Once again, I'm assuming you have no idea who "Count Dankula" is, and outside of "haha wow silly Britain arrested a guy for a Nazi dog!!!!!" you have no awareness of his long history with law enforcement?

The lengths you've been going to defend actual neo-Nazis here are impressive. I know this is out of extreme incompetence and not malice, but I'm not sure I'll be able to take you seriously the next time you claim to not be racist, or to support anti-racist movements.

and there's a guy who ranted about Muslims online.

I'm not sure how you can see a man who posted photos of himself holding a gun and threatened to kill people based on their religion and decide that it was "ranting about Muslims". It really surprises me that you see no difference between making credible threats on people's lives and "ranting". Then again, I understand you've got a mythology to defend here.

According to this article, there was even a huge anti-hate speech crackdown some years ago, with thousands of people being arrested over the course of a year.

Have you read that article? Did you follow up on what happened after it was published? It's talking about law enforcement overstepping its boundaries, and it has since led to significant adjustments. Like, yea, things went badly eight years ago when the government was trying to respond to a rise in violence. Lessons were learned, changes were implemented, and now things are going less badly. This is a good thing - it shows that our system works, and self-corrects when needed. I think y'all could learn from that, and it's not the big "gotcha" you were looking for.

There did appear to be a certain negative connotation

Nah, c'mon, both sides here are doing a bit. Just as Rushy and Roundy are grossly exaggerating for comedic effect, so am I. Cue one of them pointing out that they're not exaggerating at all, and me confirming that America is literally North Korea in turn.

Quote from: Rushy on August 25, 2024, 04:11:21 PM

More importantly, American schoolchildren are not required to say the pledge of allegiance. They only have to stand during it. That changes everything.

I stand (🥁) corrected.

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Is the UK okay?

« on: August 25, 2024, 06:07:05 PM »

You mean like an article saying they arrested someone just for making rude gestures?

But it doesn't say that, though. It lists a bunch of other issues, such as him being from Sutton, breaking out of the police cordon, and inciting disorder.

If we look beyond tabloids, we'll find that the man pleaded guilty to violent disorder: https://www.cps.gov.uk/london-south/news/rioters-who-admitted-taking-part-london-unrest-are-sentenced

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Is the UK okay?

« on: August 24, 2024, 09:37:16 PM »

Quote from: Rushy on August 24, 2024, 05:26:29 PM

I don't think it's a big ask for proof that the police are doing what they say they're doing without asking the police directly.

As much as I dislike cops, I'm going to hold on to my mantra of "innocent until proven guilty" - if the cops are demonstrably lying about what they're doing, then we need some evidence of that.

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Is the UK okay?

« on: August 24, 2024, 05:20:01 PM »

Quote from: Rushy on August 24, 2024, 04:34:06 PM

Reminder: I asked Pete for a link to prove his point and he stopped responding to me entirely.

You specifically asked for proof of what the law enforcement is doing without referencing law enforcement. Of course you didn't get a response - after all, you never troll.

Quote from: Rushy on August 24, 2024, 04:34:06 PM

It's also, coincidentally, why Europe keeps falling for memes like fascism and communism.

Careful, friend - your current options are Kamala and Trump.

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Is the UK okay?

« on: August 24, 2024, 02:56:33 PM »

In Britain, however, people are arrested and prosecuted simply for saying things that might influence other people to commit a crime at some point in the future, or, even worse, for simply being offensive.

This literally doesn't happen outside of the American far right's fantasies, and you're the last person I'd expect to have difficulty realising this.

Even if I accept that the Sutton case was because that guy was rioting and not simply for what he said, the OP leaves no doubt that people are being punished or threatened with being punished simply for expressing opinions online that might influence other people to go out and commit crimes at some point in the future.

I'm sorry to hear you fell for it. I'm not really going to invest the energy in convincing you of something so obvious. The OP says "if you commit crimes, we'll use extradition treaties to extradite you where appropriate". It refers to people who ran away abroad after committing crimes on British soil, and who continue to commit crimes - it's an extremely milquetoast statement, and perhaps it confuses you that it's a statement at all. I encourage you to take a deep breath and examine where you got your reading of the situation from - after all, you already pointed out it makes zero sense.

There may be a cultural difference here. Americans like to (but only sometimes) be very prescritpive in their wording, so they would say something like "we will prosecute to the FULLEST!1!!! extent of the law". Europeans tend to omit obvious statements like these, because they're obvious. We don't feel the need to caveat our statements with something like "we'll enforce the law unless it's illegal to do so", because we don't have a culture of cops breaking laws when it suits them.

You were the one who raised the point of all the other types of regulated speech and negatively compared them to how they're handled in other countries.

Negatively? Not at all. America's free speech laws are roughly sensible, as I've said multiple times already. Though it is telling that you perceived these statements as negative...

They're largely similar to those of Europe, with some minor pros and cons, but that's not really a negative, that's just normality. For example, you guys seem to value freedom of the press much less than Europe does, but this is just a cultural difference - you like your propaganda mills strong, but leave individuals to repeat whichever propaganda outlet they prefer. We prefer our media free, but Germany won't let you fly NSDAP flags in your back yard, and England won't let you directly call on your followers to commit genocide or storm government buildings. Different solutions for different problems. Now, that does clash with your extremely funny mythos of "free speech", which doesn't occur in reality, but that's neither here nor there.

In fact, the press freedom aspect is very visible here. Y'all are losing your shit because a guy with no influence over anything at all published an opinion piece that you dislike in a leftie tabloid. The American mindset cannot comprehend that people will express themselves freely through this medium.

Blaming riots on people expressing anti-immigration opinions as if they're somehow responsible for what all these other people did, as if all these rioters were fine upstanding citizens until racist shitposters corrupted them, is just avoiding the real problem, and doing so in a way that's fundamentally ugly for being so anti-free expression.

I mean, okay, but that's not a thing that anyone is doing. I think your problem is that you're focusing very hard on trying to explain why something is a very bad thing, without stopping to wonder whether the bad thing has taken place in recent history.

What's being criticized are the specific laws governing speech in Britain and other countries

No, what you're criticising is Rushy's rather deliberate fantasy around free speech in Britain - something you should have been well prepared to spot and react to appropriately - except you're treating it as if it held any water. If that's the level of discussion you want, then making fun of America by blatantly exaggerating its restrictions on free speech is exactly par for the course. If you'd like a better discussion, up your standards first, and then we can have a chat about the realities of both countries. Until then - haha, you guys have to say the pledge of allegiance in school, what a silly restriction on free speech! Gosh, is America okay?

Philosophy, Religion & Society / Re: Is the UK okay?

« on: August 17, 2024, 10:58:26 PM »

I think the "imminent" qualification is very important. It's the difference between yelling "Jump!" at a would-be suicide jumper and talking about how you feel that anyone who's ever had a suicidal impulse ought to go through with it, or the difference between yelling "They're going to kill you! Run, fight back, don't let them take you!" at someone whom the police are arresting and talking about how you feel that as a general principle, nobody should ever peacefully submit to being arrested - or, to return to the Tyler Kay case, the difference between leading an angry anti-immigrant protest to a hotel known for housing migrants and refugees and bellowing, "There it is, let's burn it down!" and expressing your anti-immigration opinion and saying you'd like to see the hotels that house immigrants be burned down.

I have no fucking idea what you're talking about, nor do I have any interest in finding out. It sounds like you might be agreeing with me, but its obscured by layers upon layers of whataboutism.

I strongly agree with you that obscenity laws are bullshit and have no place in a country that values free speech

Then you disagree with me, because I think restricting obscenity is pretty sensible, within certain bounds. Nonetheless, it is a restriction on the American mythos of "freedom of speech". The question here isn't whether you or I think it's a good thing. The question is whether it's happening; and it is.

That being said, though, do other countries not have or enforce obscenity laws?

Entirely irrelevant. I'm not debating whether or not the restrictions are common in other places. I'm pointing out that the American myth of unrestricted freedom of speech is just that - a myth.

"Commercial speech" is simply subject to more regulations than political or religious speech. For example, if you really want to put out a political ad that says something ridiculous about how every citizen will be given their own flying car if you're elected, you can. Nobody's going to stop you. But when you're promising goods and services in exchange for people's money, then there are more rules. You can't just outright lie about the benefits or lack of drawbacks that the drugs you're selling have, for instance. This is perfectly consistent with speech being free as a general concept, and I don't think that other countries do things especially different.

Why do you care so much about other countries? What does that have to do with anything? Y'all are claiming to be unique bastions of freedoms unimaginable to other countries, but the moment that turns out not to be the case, you default to "b-but other countries do it too!!!"

I'm surprised to hear you say that, because I've always heard that Britain is the country that has the most memal defamation laws of all, ones that heavily favor plaintiffs and have been used many times by rich assholes (J.K. Rowling being one prominent example) to silence people they don't like in a way that would never be allowed in America. You really think that America has worse defamation laws?

Once again - what's that about "other countries"? How does that affect anything about America's freedom of speech being obviously restricted?

Please explain. What's wrong with our press freedom?

What do you mean by "wrong"? I'm not arguing right or wrong here. It just so happens that the USA stands fairly low in press freedom benchmarks. It is typically described as "problematic" or "flawed" by independent organisations that act as watchdogs for this kind of stuff, like RSF or UNESCO's WPFI.