British authorities: you not only have to decide that approximations of a representation of an outlawed group are illegal, which is shaky ground at best, but you would also have to decide that open support of a group that is guilty only of vandalism of military assets is also illegal. To do so, without encroaching on the fucking Magna Carta, which y’all invented, would require an assertion that direct action on behalf of a subset of members of the group disallows the freedom of expression to support the group writ large.
UPDATE: apparently the Magna Carta had to deal with power dynamics between the crown and various lords but was symbolic in that it reduced the power of the crown in its formerly dictatorial approach.
Apparently censorship is a complex ass topic in English history and has undergone continuous stepwise changes over the centuries, in areas as diverse as theatrical plays, print media, and speakers corners in Hyde park.
Y’all still be a bunch of bitches when it comes to freedom of expression though. The country of Orwell my hairy ass.
I’m sorry, I just see a bunch of people standing around.
Are you sure it’s the T Shirt and not those socks they’re arresting him for…?
Pal,It’sTime for Action
Oh sorry didn’t see you there officer, I was just saying its time for my #sick dance 🕺 moves, is dancing a crime, officer? 😏
I’ve got a friend trying to move from the United States to England to escape our current shit show, and I’ve been telling him that England tends to do what America does, just with a posh accent to give it an air of legitimacy.
Oh, as not great as they are, they aren’t even close to being as bad as US.
You’re both selling them short. The UK is awful in ways that the Americans can only aspire to. They are each doing their own horrible things, just trading a bit of horrible culture now and then.
The UK is awful in ways that the Americans can only aspire to
Which ones are those? I struggle to come up with something that US is doing better than the UK. The whole freedom of speech issue might be the one where at least it’s not that obvious, but I would argue UK is just more upfront about it, and even though more topics are explicitly forbidden in the UK, you wouldn’t be dissapeared from the streets by an unmarked van about it, so I would say it’s still better.
I think he is saying they are following the same path, just a few steps behind. So if the US is running over a cliff, the UK will probably consider that a blazed trail and head in that direction too.
So yeah, the US sped up. Doesn’t mean the UK isn’t trying to follow.
Didn’t /u/flyingsquid move to England? He hasn’t posted in 6 months :o
Yeah, he moved into the badlands near Manchester. Ever seen the movie “The hills have eyes”? Its like that up there.
Oooh, like Hollywood?
If you think they do it with a posh accent you’ve not been to England lol
in US english posh is a synonym for british
/s (½)
That doesn’t scan. Posh Spice would by association be British Spice, and everyone knows that doesn’t exist
What Americans think of as a British accent is an accent that does in fact not exist. Literally no one speaks like that, it’s just playing into the stereotype at this point.
But we can’t make movies with genuine accents because Americans wouldn’t be able to understand it.
I’m mainly thinking of Tony Blair making the same case for invading Iraq that George W. Bush was, just with the accent.
I’m mainly thinking of marshmallows.
Nowhere is truly safe at this point. Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t.
I’m currently working out moving to Jamaica. Got a friend there to help, but he says it ain’t all sunshine and cheap pot like the movies.
I’m not LGBT but I usually use that as a guideline of “is this a good place to be?”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGBTQ_rights_in_Jamaica
And its not looking great.
Pick somewhere else.
At a certain time (around 2000) I’d count the number of women/men outside (like 20 to 40 year olds), very telling about the insecurity in a city.
Super simple and smart way to sort places that care about human rights. Thanks for sharing.
At this point, leaving England for America is the saner choice…
I mean unless you’re brown, then ICE will just lock you away if you try
Nah. It’s not great here but that’s like leaving the frying pan and jumping into a volcano that’s actively erupting. ICE aren’t just racist, they get off on hurting people and they’re really not bothered who they are.
In some ways they’re very progressive. They abduct and abuse everyone equally.
I don’t know, we locked up an extremely white new Zealander for 3 weeks at the border recently…
And several white Canadians. There are likely dozens more locked in captivity that the media hasn’t reported on.
You have the right to free speech…as long as… you’re not dumb enough to actually try it.
Can’t waste a day when the night brings a hearse
So make a move and plead the fifth 'cause ya can’t plead the firstI’m giving hope by the fact that the police clearly don’t know what to do with the situation. So they’re not automatically arresting everyone in the street for disagreeing with them. Probably because they realise they get lynched if they tried that
It’s already working. Due to the terrorism claims, each of these arrests requires a special review, and the system is being overwhelmed. Get a few more hundred or thousands of people to get an arrest for this, and the whole government scheme will have to be abandoned, because there will be no practical way for system to follow the required procedures for each case.
laughs in American prison system
Every city has had the capacity to bus a few thousand people to a holding facility since at least the 2000s
Fascists get pretty clever at solving that problem. They create these camps where they can just concentrate them in one place.
The British invented them in fact!!
It can’t be any worse than Butlins
Oooh they should come up with a clever name for them… Focus Groups? Nah that doesn’t quite work.
See how that worked out for USA, when push came to shove - the law was abandoned.
Yes, and that will be an important lesson to people. Then we can move to the next step to topple the capitalists.
so then they declare martial law
combining words of the pleistocene and Palestine.
In what other profession are you allowed to just stand there in public with a constant hand on someone?
Who is Donald Trump on Jeffrey Epstein’s island, Alex.
I mean… The act of not allowing you to leave is the problem here not the fact he is maintaining contact with his forearm.
I take offense at the unwanted contact.
If I were to do this to someone, they would have me arrested for it in addition to restraining them. Therefore fuck these pigs. Why are they above that?
For the US it is Supreme court precedent. If they suspect you’re committing a crime they can detain you while they investigate. If you give resistance to the detainment they can use force as long as it fits within their use of force policy and is reasonable with respect to the totality of circumstances. That’s the simple version. The UK likely has its own version of this.
This guy got de-arrested
Hopefully everyone will buy these t-shirts just to take the piss
Start a glassware company called Pal-3 Steins, sell merch for your new sale: Free Pal-3 Steins!
Pickering has made copies of the T-shirt, which he is selling through his own website to raise money for the charity Medical Aid for Palestinians. It has sold in 28 countries already.
About five minutes later, the arresting officer approached him again. “He said: ‘I’ve got good news and I’ve got bad news.’ I said: ‘What’s the good news?’ He said: ‘I’m de-arresting you.’
“And I said: ‘What’s the bad news?’ He said: ‘It’s going to be really embarrassing for me.’ And then I walked free, while all the real heroes are the people that are actually getting arrested.”
The officer seems to understand his mistake at least
The poor copper lost all that time arresting a guy with Plasticine Action on his t-shirt only to have to de-arrest him when he could’ve been arresting an old lady with the words “Palestine Action” written down on a piece of paper for her to be prosecuted and maybe even get a jail sentence.
That mistake was making it hard for him to make his quota of arrests for that week, the poor bloke.
This is why I always imagine it’d be funny to ask a cop “so how many murders got solved this week?” whenever they’re wasting time on mundane shit.
I’ve never had an interaction with a cop where they didn’t make it unnecessarily intense.
Police solve something like less than 2% of reported crimes.
Even a libertarian can see this is fucking stupid, imagine a restaurant that gets 2% of its orders correct and served in a timely manner.
Police do not primarily exist to solve crimes.
They primarily exist as a goon/thug class to protect property and capital, all other behaviors and effects are ancillary.
If Police wanted to actually lessen crime, they’d either attack its root causes and use significant parts of their budgets to fund affordable housing and public schools, or massively reorient toward pursuing white collar crime, which is often of such a huge financial scale that it basically directly impoverishes society at a large scale.
That figure is a little misleading, but I understand how you picked it up because it’s everywhere.
Police “clear” crimes to be progressed for prosecution.
Prosecutors “prosecute” crimes. It’s this that the 2% figure is aimed at. The clearance rates (the job done by the police) is higher.
According to this article[1], 22% of reported serious crimes led to arrests. 4% (of reported serious crimes) led to convictions. They then halve both of those numbers to account for unreported crimes. The article still uses the 2% figure in the headline despite the nuance in the article.
That might sound academic given the overall point you make still stands. I just thought it was worth mentioning.
1: https://theconversation.com/police-solve-just-2-of-all-major-crimes-143878
Ok then, so more technically, and more generously to police from a purely reactionary perspective of ‘they can only respond to reports’… they do an adequate job of clearing 4% of what actually gets reported to them.
I know that cops dont actually prosecute, I made that post before falling asleep, I was a bit loose with language.
Their role in the prosecution process is basically to be witnesses, to gather evidence for the trial.
And, unless I am misunderstanding this… ~82% of the arrests they do actually make … don’t result in convictions, and are thus ‘overarrests’ in some sense… as … you went to all the effort to make an arrest, and it turns out that no actual crime was committed?
Cops have an ~18% chance of making an arrest for a serious crime that actually sticks?
They have an ~82% likelihood that they are overpolicing, like by definition, when it comes to serious crimes?
Apologies if I sounded like I was lecturing there. I got very into the numbers.
I see the 82% figure you mention too. But I feel out of my depth now. An arrest requires probable cause (a low threshold), whereas courts require reasonable doubt (a high threshold). The gap between these two seems to be what should let police work function. Eg: attorneys examine or challenge the charges, plea deals, case dismissal / acquittal etc. But I’m skimming articles I don’t understand at this point.
82% does seem high to me too. But I also see too many cut-and-dry cases on TV. I don’t know what to think.
22% of reported serious crimes led to arrests. 4% (of reported serious crimes) led to convictions
So what I’m reading is that police are wrong or bad at what they do ~82% of the time.
78%, but yes
Their job is not to solve crimes, their job is to get people convicted, the subtle difference being that they’ll turn non-crimes into crimes (for example, they’ll chose to legally interpret things which can go both ways as crimes which require prosecution, which is why one often sees kids criminalized for childish bullshit) and it doesn’t matter if the person convicted is innocent, all that matters is that somebody got convicted (so, for example, they won’t try and find exonerating evidence).
This partly explains their tendency to take an adversarial posture towards people who aren’t from their group, also partly explained because that posture itself indirectly feeds back on them (people are weary of them because of how act towards the general public, which in turn makes them feel apart and suspicious hence they behave even more so) and partly because they do tend to get exposed far more than most people to the seedy side of humanity all with a judgemental mindset and an aim to see crimes, so even a lot of the stuff they see which most people think is just silly fun (say, most drunkenness), they’ll see as crimes.
Pardon my ignorance, but is wearing a shirt with the word Palestine on it and arrestable offense in England?
Palestine Action yes. An activism organization called Palestine Action was classified as a terrorist organization a few weeks ago by the UK government.
A yes “the terrorist organization” label to censor anything they don’t agree. Don’t forget they’re trying to classify drug cartels/gangs as “terrorist organizations” too as excuses to invade other countries, specially in the global south.
Y’all seem to have a lot going on across the pond, what with “who’s a terrorist,” or “is this dystopian?”
Have y’all considered electing a terrorist leader so that you instantly know the answers to those questions?
Ah yes, the accelerationist approach. Fight fire with fire, etc. Let’s see how it pans out!
Ah, thanks for the explanation
Some people of Palestine Action threw ink on a military plane parked on some airbase which is normally used for the surveillance flights of Gaza that the UK is doing to give the data to Israel, hence they were officially classified by the Home Secretary - Yvette Cooper - as “terrorist group” via a process which has no strict well defined criteria or Judicial oversight at all.
Because of that anybody who supports them in any way (including merelly voicing their support for them or holding a written paper with the name of the group) risks a prison sentence of (if I remember it correctly) up to 10 years.
Hence in the UK wearing a t-shirt with the words “Palestine Action” in it is a terrorist offense with a prision sentense of up to 10 years: it’s all pretty similar to the legislation Putin has to stop people in Russia demonstrating against the invasion of Ukraine, only I believe the prison sentences in Russia are actually lower.
(Britain isn’t quite at the “hold up blank piece of paper” stage like Russia yet, but judging by the copper arresting somebody wearing a “Plasticine Action” t-shirt, the police are already thinking along similar lines - the coppers in Britain are well aware that their job is to “serve the powerful” not “serve the public”)
Britain is a complete total authoritarian clown shown nowadays, though this shit is a pretty natural stage in the evolution of authoritarianism and represssion masquerading as Rule Of Law over there since around Tony Blair’s time.
so weird how we’ve mangled the word terrorism around to mean impeding a military machine or body. maybe this is just my brain turning to worm food but I could have swore it was explicitly when you kill civilians or destroy infrastructure in order to coerce a policy change. but that alteration probably wasn’t intentional or for any specific purpose.
25 years ago, the day I stopped watching TV news- the dramatic talking head told me that terrorists had attacked a US military base in Afganistan.
oof. yeah. I don’t like pointing at 9/11 and desert storm as the time when it changed but it REALLY seems like that was when it changed. I was 9 and got in a lot of trouble for not saying the pledge of allegiance and even though I was way to young to have a real opinion bback then you really can’t fault anyone for coming to the conclusion that we might be the fucking baddies
Yeah, that was the inflexion point.
Back then, people were cautioning against this lingusitic slight of hand, this overuse of rhetorically charged language… because they could lead to a world where ‘everything i dont like is a terrorist’.
But they weren’t listened to, PATRIOT ACT passed, and we now live in the world we were told we would, but even worse actually, because the internet is forever and the NSA has been doing its damndest to make a permanent hard backup of all internet traffic at its mega data center in Utah for over a decade.
Ironically what this means is that Osama Bin Laden won.
He goaded us into destroying ourselves, and we did, we went insane.
The ‘Great Satan’ is doing just a bangup job of carrying out the NeoCon plan for an American Century, what with electing an incompetent idiot rapist who has basically single handedly caused the second Great Depression, and caused us to lose almost all of our international allies.
we might be the fucking baddies
It depends. Is it relative? Even then, sometimes we are and sometimes we aren’t.
There aren’t many nations that have their hands clean.
That was when I first noticed that word being abused so egregiously. I wouldn’t be surprised if it started before that.
Yeah it’s supposed to be the use of violence to spread fear, usually for some political aim. I guess we’re counting “violence” against property now too 🙄
And specifically on civilian targets
By an amazing coincidence over-broad legislation made on top of a legally undefined word ended up used against things and groups which weren’t at all the claimed targets of that legislation.
This was also totally unexpected and nobody could ever had foreseen how they could be leveraged for such uses when those laws were first drafted and approved.
Hopscotching backward time and time again into fascism because we laser focused of bad words and not the actual languages of power.
at least it looks like the guy in the video got off the hook by simply swapping a word around so there’s that. kind of funny in the context of what you said
The War on [undefined]
Eh. 100 years ago, “terrorism” meant “assassinating royalty”.
did it actually? that is interesting.
ohhhh because it was coined during the French revolution. I should have guessed
They graffitied two planes in protest against England’s support of Israel’s genocide, which makes them evil dangerous terrorists!
Not that I’d support them of course, I’m no terrorist - I fully support whatever genocides my country wants to participate in please do not gulag me Kid Starver oh no he’s in the hou
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Pretty sure that’s Scotland, not England (Glasgow to be specific). But yeah, the British government decided carrying a Palestine Action sign was basically terrorism.
It is now!
But it doesn’t even say that.
I’m aware. He was being harassed for something similar which was why I asked
To be fair, the (good) British cops are by far not as likely to assault an innocent person as many others. But they do love to stop you and have a chat if even the tiniest thing stands out. I once walked around London, 15 years old, with toy handcuffs on one wrist. Cop came up to me and wanted to know the whole story, like one of those super-chatty people. Where are you from, how old, name, where are the cuffs from, why am I wearing them right now at this moment, …
He seemed happy with the answers, and we both moved on.
Well, it’s still a bother, especially when you are not free to walk away at any moment.
Yeah before anybody spoke I was fairly clued in that this was not America by the fact that the cops were just standing there acting chill instead of holding him on the ground and screaming at him to stop resisting arrest.
It also helps that it’s in public and they are being filmed.
George Floyd’s execution was filmed in public. As were several other murders by police. In America, the cops don’t care. They will choke or shoot someone and no judge will ever let them be prosecuted for it.
If the toy looked like the real thing, You are 15, an underage with handcuffs, for all he know someone was trying to keep you captive and you manage to get out or you plan to cause damage and handdcuff someone. Good for him to make sure no one actually was hurting you…
Not fans of claymation, I guess.
Not fans of AI, actually. Under the Plasticine Action, it says “WE OPPOSE AI GENERATED ANIMATION”
We need the Pingu version of V for Vendetta.
Noot noot!
I swear to god Pingo used to speak English. I have very clear memories of episodes with dialogue. I think I may have somehow transferred from another universe at some point.
It’s not just the two we see - they are apparently in radio contact with additional tax fraudsters / wasters, probably of higher rank or even with a law degree.
Never let them tell they need more funds. Could defund plenty without affecting any actual service one bit.
I mean at least they are actually discussing if this is arrestable, in the USA, cops would just shoot you.
Picture yourself in a train in a station
With Palestine porters with looking glass ties
