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The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)

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241–250 of 327 posts

Re: The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)

#241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It’s very rare these people have any idea how to actually execute their plans. Regarding Cummins, Why exactly? Dominic Cummins is articulate, seems to be quite intelligent and seems to be very fact/data orientated. I've also heard him describe how he would action particular policy. Therefore I find it hard to believe he had didn't have any idea on how to execute his plans.

You are Dominic Cummins and I claim my 5 pounds :)

It seems when some people don't have an answer they prefer to deflect with a joke.

Re: The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)

#242
post #216

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As another poster has already pointed out to you, the person holding the blank piece of paper was not arrested. A number of the arrests of anti-monarchy protestors were subsequently ruled unlawful (e.g. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cwyenzdz66wo ). All of this was widely reported in the British media and generally agreed to be a bad thing, so it doesn't really fit with your narrative of Brits being in denial ab…

> As another poster has already pointed out to you, the person holding the blank piece of paper was not arrested. I was under the impression it was not a single incident, but that's great that it wasn't. The bigger problem, though, was people being arrested for holding up "not my king" or similar signs. According to one site[0], there were 64 arrests that day. I don't think it matters that no charges were filed or wh…

Ok, but please just do a quick search and check your facts before kicking off a long discussion thread on a false basis. I promise you that a lot of the pushback you're getting from Brits is down to the factual inaccuracies and exaggerations in your posts, not any great love we have for police crackdowns on peaceful protests.

Re: The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)

#243
post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They’re also strengthening the criminal consequences for future governments that misuse their position: https://bills.parliament.uk/bills/4019

Which can be undone by another single act of your “sovereign” Parliament. Acts like this must be understood in that context.

This works both ways though, ie there’s no point opposing the laws on the grounds that they might be abused in future because the future sovereign parliament could just pass the same abusable laws.

Re: The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)

#244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think tribalism is the simpler explanation. One of the worst offenders I saw was a guy on here who wrote one of the new generation shells written in go...went out of his way to say the US had the same behavior as the UK, arresting people holding a blank sign, except his evidence was the disproportionate shooting of black people by police. An entirely unrelated issue. The point was though he was flailing due to feel…

> his evidence was the disproportionate shooting of black people by police In the UK? The police shoot very few people of any colour! Two in 2025: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_police_in_... Is there even a bit enough sample to draw such conclusions (let alone that correlation does not imply causation)

No, in the US. That's why it was silly.

I was talking about protestors being arrested for holding up signs, he said the same thing happened in the US but his evidence was the disproportionate shooting of black people by police in the US, which while very bad is an entirely different issue.

Re: The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)

#245
post #242

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As another poster has already pointed out to you, the person holding the blank piece of paper was not arrested. I was under the impression it was not a single incident, but that's great that it wasn't. The bigger problem, though, was people being arrested for holding up "not my king" or similar signs. According to one site[0], there were 64 arrests that day. I don't think it matters that no charges were filed or wh…

Ok, but please just do a quick search and check your facts before kicking off a long discussion thread on a false basis. I promise you that a lot of the pushback you're getting from Brits is down to the factual inaccuracies and exaggerations in your posts, not any great love we have for police crackdowns on peaceful protests.

> Ok, but please just do a quick search and check your facts before kicking off a long discussion thread on a false basis.

My facts here would have been previous HN discussions that would have been very hard to find.

> I promise you that a lot of the pushback you're getting from Brits is down to the factual inaccuracies and exaggerations in your posts

No, that isn't the case, and you're not in a position to promise that; it's an assumption you're making, and I would ask you to question your motivation for doing so.

In the previous posts I was using as an example discussion the coronation, people were downplaying protestors being arrested for holding up signs. Nothing was being exaggerated, all the facts were accurate as they had just happened - sources were abundant.

Re: The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)

#246
post #174

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pretty hard to underreport homicide

Not sure homicide fits into “small crime” category.

No, but it serves as a sense check on the other data. If the official stats were bogus and crime were spiraling out of control in London, it would be somewhat surprising to see homicides going down. The fact that one of the most objectively measurable crimes is going down lends some additional credibility to the statistics indicating that this trend is also being seen across other crime categories.

Re: The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)

#247

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's because he was elected with a historically low % of the vote. Few wanted him at the election, few want him now.

Most don't want any of the options presented to them. Almost all the parties don't really serve the electorate, so a large number of people are abstaining. I appreciate this in an anecdotal but I've spoken to quite a few people I know in my family, that saw it as their civil duty to vote and they told all told me some variation of "there is nobody worth voting for", "I don't think it matters who I vote for".

There are good options I think for most people. I did not like labors party policy, so I voted for the Lib Dems in a large labour area, did it achieve anything for them? No, did I do my civil duty?

I am sure many green voters felt the same way for many years and now they stand a decent chance of getting many seats!

Re: The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)

#248

This is how you govern from a position of unpopularity. The government knows they’re on the wrong side of many issues, to the point they know they can’t win an open debate. So media control, regulation by enforcement, and institutional control becomes the focus of effort.

I don't agree. The British State has been going in this direction ever since Blair's government and probably before that. I don't remember Blair's government being that unpopular.

New labour really laid the groundwork for alot of the orwellian laws that are in place now. Its a shame nobody who has been elected since sought to roll them back...

Re: The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)

#249
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anecdote is not data. It is both true that the police absolutely suck at handling petty crime, and the Met have a fairly terrible reputation; and that more serious violent crime is much, much less of a problem in London than it used to be (and less than US cities, of course).

from https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/world/europe/london-polic... A record 80,000 phones were stolen in the city last year [inferred to be 2024], according to the police, giving London an undesirable reputation as a European capital for the crime. Overall crime in London has fallen in recent years, but phone theft is disproportionately high, representing about 70 percent of thefts last year. And it has risen sharp…

Something that does upset me is that only the monetary value of a phone is ultimately considered in sentencing but these days a phone is a lot more, it is a lifeline to the rest of the world often having your ability to pay and travel built in. A theft of a phone can make a bad day very long and very difficult.

Re: The UK is shaping a future of precrime and dissent management (2025)

#250
Precrime in Minority report results in "Would-be killers are placed in an electrically induced coma and held in a panopticon-like prison facility." Obviously dystopian.

What they are doing in the UK is more chatting to people involved in gangs and the like to talk them out of screwing up their lives. Kind of common sense.

This has led to "London’s lowest murder rate in more than a decade" https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2026/jan/12/why-londons-...

There was quite an interesting interview with Sadiq Khan about it yesterday https://youtu.be/SOhIxmYiZRg?t=202 (starting at the crime bit).

The MAGA types love to go on about Khan, who is a lefty Pakistani origin muslim, as being the downfall of London but the reality is kind of different. (typed in central London).

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