Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK • Hacker News Board

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#301

Post by gruez » Fri, Apr 01, 2022, 9:49 PM UTC

sofixa wrote: post #120

roenxi wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've established - quite clearly - that in an emergency the government can lock everything down for 2 years and that lip service to liberty or human rights means nothing. Emergencies happen every 2-3 years. Why won't we see similar anti-liberty measures again in the next 20 years? 'We' 'know' it 'works'. It isn't even clear that we'll be spared another pandemic through that timeframe, the world is quite small these…

> Emergencies happen every 2-3 years. The last time a pandemic of this scale happened was a century ago. True, with the destruction of animal habitats and climate change ( which feeds into the former), we'll probably see more epidemics from now on. And yes, the restrictions worked against that type of emergency - an airborne virus of pandemic proportions. It's a fallacy to claim that now that we know all that and the…

>Oh yes, QR codes surveillance.

This but unironically. Do you not see the surveillance implications of having your p̵a̵p̵e̵r̵s̵ vaccine passports scanned everywhere you go?

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#302

Post by sreejithr » Fri, Apr 01, 2022, 9:50 PM UTC

I've been noticing how much I'm "self-censoring" nowadays. The whole "free world" concept is a lie. Even the "guardians of freedom" USA wants you to disclose all social media handles if I apply for a visa. That means whatever I say online is already getting profiled.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#303

Post by autoexec » Fri, Apr 01, 2022, 9:51 PM UTC

oliwarner wrote: post #183

rglover wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is exactly why "hate speech" laws are so dangerous. It gives carte blanche to the government to go after anyone who says anything any one person (or the government itself) might find offensive.

And we have a judiciary who can —still, for the moment— make and break statue based on their rulings via appeals and the Supreme Court. The government does not have carte blanche any more than a government already does. The last 2 years has shown us they're pretty much a law unto themselves. I hope this case is appealled, and the law thoroughly weighed against human rights.

> And we have a judiciary who can —still, for the moment— make and break statue based on their rulings via appeals and the Supreme Court.

One of the nice things about being able to ask for a trial by jury is that jury nullification can help ensure that laws aren't abused even when judges are perfectly willing to "make examples" of people

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#304

Post by causality0 » Fri, Apr 01, 2022, 9:52 PM UTC

xboxnolifes wrote: post #121

I feel like I must have been corrupted by the internet or something if the tweet in question is considered "grossly offensive". It certainly isn't nice , but 18 months supervision and 150 hours of community service? I don't even know how to put my bafflement into words here.

"Freedom to offend" is a core tenet of American freedom of speech. It is not at all present in the United Kingdom or for the most part continental Europe. You can be arrested for Tweeting something mean, for calling a police officer a rude name, for insulting a religious figure. Whether or not whatever it is the Europeans gained in exchange for giving up that right was worth it is up to you.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#305

Post by mardifoufs » Fri, Apr 01, 2022, 9:55 PM UTC

ciupicri wrote: post #268

helloworld11 wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many countries, including many in Europe have some very serious, heavy racial issues that are both more ingrained than those of the U.S and in quite a few cases more violent or openly discriminatory. The U.S. however is generally at or close to the center of global media familiarity and attention, so naturally, the theme of its own racial issues is disproportionately magnified. How many major countries are overtly et…

What European countries?

France? The discourse around islam is insane there, and you have an almost neo-nazi party like the FN getting 30%+ of the votes regularly there. There is no shame in talking about forced expulsion of legitimate immigrants there too( "Remigration" ).

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#306

Post by akomtu » Fri, Apr 01, 2022, 9:59 PM UTC

a_shovel wrote: post #234

mlindner wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of having been discriminated against is by definition not a "privilege". What's wrong isn't the lack of discrimination, but the idea that lack of discrimination should be called a "privledge" rather than a "norm". It attacks people for not having hardship, namely turning something that's good int o something that's bad. The use of the term "white privledge" fundamentally applies that to make things "equal" w…

Each sentence, though individually false, comes together to produce an overall point that is also false. A lack of a disadvantage others have is a privilege. The point of calling it a privilege is to emphasize that white people benefit from racism against other groups even when they don't do anything racist themselves. Benefitting knowingly from discrimination against others while doing nothing to end it is complicit…

The 'privilege' is just a trick to divide you and make you fight each other. If it was't black vs white, it would be a 'privilege' based on subtle shades of skin, hair, eyes or even height. Anything works to distract masses from the fact that the only real privilege is hereditary wealth. Having the right family name is The Privilege. It's unbelievable that the relatively smart people fail to see this elephant in the room and instead fall for that shallow and self contradictory "anti-racism" doctrine.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#307

Post by f7ebc20c97 » Fri, Apr 01, 2022, 10:00 PM UTC

krapp wrote: post #285

f7ebc20c97 wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The slope is slippery because, given enough time, lawyers are always be able to form a causal effect chain from human action A to undesirable outcome B.

This implies all such causal chains, regardless of their nature, will always be accepted as valid. If that were true, no lawyer would ever lose a case. It's the same argument that people make when they say, because any word can be claimed to mean anything, any so-called hate speech crime can be used to make any arbitrary speech illegal, simply by labeling any form of speech "hate speech." It's the 'perfectly spherica…

Okay, buddy, we have this thing called the Internet now. It's a magical place where you can be anonymous and say whatever the fuck you want. The cat has left the bag.

All restrictive speech laws do now is push dissidents underground into radicalizing echochambers like 4chan, while at the same time rapidly expanding the scope of "dissident" to include anyone who says anything remotely offensive to anybody. Is that what you want?

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#308

Post by impalallama » Fri, Apr 01, 2022, 10:01 PM UTC

Reading that headline, I was thinking it might be like a specific graphic death threat against someone, or just some vile racial epithets but no its just the kinda edgy stuff you see all over social media. Upsetting that this is even a thing and sets a very bad precedent.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#309

Post by trhway » Fri, Apr 01, 2022, 10:02 PM UTC

To illustrate the effects of administrative suppression of free speech one can observe that Russian propaganda freely blossoms on the platforms where free speech is significantly administratively suppressed, ie. for example FB, Twitter, LinkedIn - the places where speech violating various "safe space" rules is handled by getting administratively deleted. Russian propaganda is a product of a free speech suppressed environment and easily thrives in such conditions. The rebuttals to Russian propaganda on those platforms gets reported by Russians as harassment and bullying and thus frequently gets deleted, and as a result the Russian propaganda stays there unchallenged or weakly challenged at best. One of the main point of Russian propaganda is rationalization and normalization of the actions of their fascist regime, and such rationalization/normalization naturally fits the "safe space" rules of those platforms, while denying "safe space" to that propaganda is one of the most important thing in fighting it, yet those platforms in many cases de-facto help Russian propaganda by allowing it to highjack the free speech suppression machinery on those platforms.

Compare that to for example HN and Reddit - the places where free speech has much less administrative suppression and where the speech is mostly moderated by the community. There is much less Russian propaganda in those environments because any time it appears it gets strong rebuttals which stay together with the propaganda. As a result anybody exposed to that propaganda here gets also exposed to the rebuttals, and that is naturally net loss to the propaganda, ie. the propaganda can't thrive in the environments where free speech isn't suppressed.

Re: Twitter user sentenced to 150 hours of community service in UK

#310

Post by autoexec » Fri, Apr 01, 2022, 10:03 PM UTC

inglor_cz wrote: post #261

MadSudaca wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At first glance it may seem baffling, but if you see it from the “different culture different values” framework, you realize it’s just how people there want their society to conduct itself. It’s no different, from this perspective, to how baffling may seem cultures where burping loudly in the dinner table is not frowned upon, where people really value their personal space or not, and on and on.

I am from such a "different culture", and I hate criminalization of speech. Unfortunately, it is a minor topic in our politics and thus the status quo is likely to stay that way, not to mention that the EU where we are members wouldn't probably let us decriminalize hate speech; the winds in Brussels blow in the other direction. The USA is protected by its Supreme Court and the fact that the Constitution is impossible…

I agree that they would. It's so disheartening to see how quickly people have been convinced to abandon a freedom people had to fight so hard in order to assert just decades earlier. The folks involved in the Free Speech Movement who have died already are certainly spinning in their graves, but those still alive have to just look at the kids today and wonder where we went wrong.