There's absolutely mismanagement, and politicians could do an awful lot to change this. Ironically, in the UK at least, most of the reasons why they don't are due to historic regulations designed to protect either the fossil fuel industry or an initially weak green energy industry, which no longer serves any purpose except to push both households and businesses into decline.
I'm not sure they've been shown to be violent (unless you consider damage to property as violence- I know some do, but personally my "things are just things" stance limits violence to actions which impact people, who matter.
Broadly speaking though, I agree. What they did was criminal damage, undoubtedly, I have no problem arresting and prosecuting people for that. But I don't believe that it's terrorism, nor that it would have been so unpopular had it not been bloody embarrassing for the armed forces. Honestly, bolt cutters and some paint should not be grounding some of your air defence.
> Giving evidence earlier, he said the group's only intention was to "break in, cause as much damage to the factory as possible, destroy weapons and prevent the factory from reopening".
I count "causing as much damage as possible" to be violent.
While I think graffiti taggers "damage property" but are non-violent. But in many places, rival gangs blow up/set alight/demolish their rivals' homes/businesses/vehicles, etc. That counts as pretty strong violence to me, even if no people are injured.
Anyway, talking of people being injured, watch a member of Palestine Action (Samuel Corner, 23, Oxford University graduate) drive a sledgehammer into a police seargent while she's trying to arrest his comrade:
I'd designate them as a terrorist group for destroying factories, not so much for spraypainting planes. But I'd still support your right to say you support them, even though I'd disagree.
> I count "causing as much damage as possible" to be violent.
That is just not what the word violent means (unless used figuratively but I don't think that's what you mean). It means hurting, or attempting to hurt, a person (or maybe an animal). Setting fire or blowing up a home which might have people still in it is certainly violent, but destroying property for the sake or property destruction is not.
Of course, deliberately attacking someone with a sledgehammer certainly is.
There are a lot of definitions for violence, but most would include "destruction" along with "harm", "pain", "suffering" and so on.
If I intentionally wreck your home, like I properly ransack the place, smash it all up, I'd say I had been violent to you. Wouldn't you? You wouldn't walk in to find your home and your life ruined and say "oh it's just property damage", would you?
If my nation was at war with yours, and we dropped a bomb on your weapons factory, would you count that as violent, or non-violent?
FWIW, if you did that to my house I'd be upset and angry and not much inclined to use the word "just" about it, but no, I wouldn't say you'd been violent to me.
(I would say you'd been violent to me if you'd slapped me in the face. I would rather be slapped in the face than have my house ransacked and smashed up. Some not-violent things are worse than some violent things.)
If you dropped a bomb on a weapons factory that had, or plausibly could have had, people in it then that would unquestionably be an act of violence. If you somehow knew that there was nothing there but hardware then I wouldn't call it an act of violence.
(In practice, I'm pretty sure that when you drop a bomb you scarcely ever know that you're not going to injure or kill anyone.)
I'm not claiming that this is the only way, or the only proper way, to use the word "violence". But, so far as I can tell from introspection, it is how I would use it.
There are contexts in which I would use the word "violence" to include destruction that only affects things and not people. But they'd be contexts that already make it clear that it's things and not people being affected. E.g., "We smashed up that misbehaving printer with great violence, and very satisfying it was too".
> If I intentionally wreck your home, like I properly ransack the place, smash it all up, I'd say I had been violent to you. Wouldn't you? You wouldn't walk in to find your home and your life ruined and say "oh it's just property damage", would you?
There's certainly implied violence. Like, if you done that once, maybe you'll be back tomorrow when I happen to be in, and actually be violent to me. And even if that weren't the case, I'd still obviously be very distressed about the situation.
But, having said all that, no I wouldn't say you had been violent, if you hadn't actually tried to hurt anyone.
If you dropped a bomb on an abandoned or fully automated factory, that you could be 100% sure doesn't have any people in it - then I still wouldn't count that as "violent" (except maybe figuratively), no matter how destructive.
One member did very violently attack a police officer:
> A police sergeant was left unable to drive, shower or dress herself after a Palestine Action activist allegedly hit her with a sledgehammer during a break-in at an Israeli defence firm's UK site, a trial has heard.
Of course, one violent member does not make an organisation into a terrorist organisation. But, just as a matter of fact, there has been some actual violence against a person.
As I'm from - and in - the UK, let's have a look at this shall we? Both the tweet and the one to which it's responding...
> There are always technical bugs during the early phases of new technology, especially AI, and those issues are typically addressed quickly.
But this is precisely the point - they haven't been addressed quickly, they've been excused and generally ignored/used to troll. I believe they've now been moved behind a paywall, which is certainly one way to communicate how you feel about CSAM material.
> Let’s be clear: this is not about technical compliance. This is a political war against @elonmusk and free speech—nothing more.
Hardly - X has acted without any real consequence here for ages, despite turning into an absolute cesspit. MPs, Ministers, government departments - many are still using it despite everything. That aside, that a different country has slightly different views on free speech than (part of) your own country is not, in any way, a crime. Most nations have some speech which is restricted, at least in some circumstances, the US is no exception to this.
Now, onto the "inspiration"...
> The UK jails people for calling rapists "pigs."
Does it? Show me. Show me the case where that has happened. Our legal rulings are public.
> ...various other unhinged lunacy until...
> Starmer is just punishing a platform that won't bend the knee.
Do these people have the concept of irony surgically extracted? Everything Trump does is generally about punishing people that won't bend the knee/pay him/hand over a chunk of their Kingdom. "Country actually enforces own law" shouldn't really be a headline, but I guess for these people it is now...
In all seriousness, why is that a problem? Surely for embedded, the size and hardware usage of the resultant binary is what matters, not the size/number of tools used to build it? I get that a lot of people worry about supply chain attacks right now (and that's fine, everyone should be thinking about how to mitigate that problem/reduce it) - but going back to a world where code re-use is significantly less usable isn't likely to magically make everything better, that has trade-offs too - particularly if (as plenty of people clearly do) they want a modern dev experience for embedded hardware.
I've built an event-sourcing/stream framework on top of Fjall v3, and it's been a fantastic fit. It's a great building block for many systems where a more high-level storage system is either overkill or a poor match for the access patterns you actually have (in my case, sequential access to prefix-filtered data gets you 95% of the way to an efficient persistent stream). I started trying to layer things on top of PostgreSQL and similar, and the impedance mismatch and resultant unpleasant code (and performance!) made me look elsewhere.
Ok, there's some context missing from those summaries though, no? In the first case it's not just "arrested for praying" it's "arrested for being in an exclusion zone specifically designated to try and stop you harassing people undertaking a lawful activity". They would have been arrested regardless of activity, it's effectively a restraining order and describing it as "for praying" is nonsense.
In the second case, it was not about misgendering someone - they were accused of a campaign of persistent harassment, something which the Daily Mail fails to mention except as a minor aside near the end of the article (not untypical of the Mail, naturally).
The Linehan case was debatable, and the approach taken probably wrong in some forms by the police (as admitted) but they were not arrested for simply voicing an opinion, but for behaviour which was sufficiently threatening and/or assaulting for the police to believe that a crime may have been committed and thus warrant further action.
There are cases of overreach, that applies outside of the speech issue as well - and indeed for any country with a reasonably effective policing system, it's never perfect. But these cases are not the simple slam-dunk that people will try and paint them as.
> In the first case it's not just "arrested for praying" it's "arrested for being in an exclusion zone specifically designated to try and stop you harassing people undertaking a lawful activity". They would have been arrested regardless of activity, it's effectively a restraining order and describing it as "for praying" is nonsense.
I think part of the absurdity being pointed out is that "just standing there with your eyes closed and silently praying" is considered "harassment" at all. It just stretches the meaning of the word part the point where it seems meaningful.
Edit: I think this ultimately becomes a Sorites paradox. Obviously a whole mob of people gathered around an abortion clinic and silently praying while you're trying to enter is intimidating and should qualify as harassment, but one person doing that clearly is not. There is no point at which the number of people become "a mob" though.
> bviously a whole mob of people gathered around an abortion clinic and silently praying while you're trying to enter is intimidating and should qualify as harassment, but one person doing that clearly is not.
The case I know of all involve individuals.
Apart from silent prayer, a woman was arrested for holding up a sign saying that coercion was a crime and offering to talk to anyone who wanted to. Is that intimidating?
"Apart from silent prayer, a woman was arrested for holding up a sign saying that coercion was a crime and offering to talk to anyone who wanted to. Is that intimidating?"
Depends on the context. Body language etc. But the main context is probably they were gathering in a place where it is forbidden to gather. Not arrested for praying or holding up signs.
Precisely this - it's the being there that was forbidden, not the act of praying - I'm not aware of any modern case where such a thing has been proscribed (at a guess, I would have said the last time was probably around the era of Cromwell, without checking).
Being there was forbidden for a specific group of people because they had a track record of harassing behaviour, much like a restraining order will likely be granted if someone has a track record of abusive behaviour towards another person. The praying thing is always mentioned as it makes it sound like some astonishing intervention in personal religion, while in reality, it's a complete red herring designed to rile people of a pre-existing viewpoint.
> Ok, there's some context missing from those summaries though, no? In the first case it's not just "arrested for praying" it's "arrested for being in an exclusion zone specifically designated to try and stop you harassing people undertaking a lawful activity"
How is standing by the road side saying and doing nothing harassing someone? The law is clearly not intended to prevent harassment (which was already illegal). Its purpose is to prevent women from being offered alternatives to abortion (e.g. accommodation, financial help, awareness of avaiable help and benefits)
> The Linehan case was debatable, and the approach taken probably wrong in some forms by the police (as admitted) but they were not arrested for simply voicing an opinion
They? Lineham definitely identifies as "he" so you are deliberately misgendering him
> How is standing by the road side saying and doing nothing harassing someone?
If you're standing by an abortion clinic, and you're a prominent anti-abortion campaigner, who has been known to harass people in the past, it was considered that your presence there is, in and of itself, intimidating to people who wish to access a legal service without undue interference. The ruling is not intended to prevent any of the things you mention, there are still plenty of ways that organisations can make those things generally known if they wish to, just not a particular group of people directly outside a clinic where they have a history of illegal behaviour.
In terms of misgendering Linehan, singular they has been around since the 14th century at the latest, and many style guides are more than happy with the usage for an individual where either gender is unknown, or where gender is considered irrelevant to the case in point. In this case, I would say the latter applies, but I am happy to acknowledge that Linehan identifies as "he" - significantly happier than he is to afford others similar courtesy.
Saying they were "just in an exclusion zone" is kind of a self-justifying excuse. It’s the same logic you see in authoritarian countries, like when Russian police arrest people for holding blank signs because they’re technically standing in a prohibited area.
If the government can simply label certain places off-limits and turn ordinary, non-violent behaviour into a crime, then the rule of law stops being a protection and starts being a way to selectively shut people up.
First of all, this is not, in any meaningful sense "the government" - the UK has an independent judiciary interpreting laws defined by parliament, but this was not at the behest of government in any reasonable sense.
Secondly, this is not the blanket labelling of a place as "off-limits" - it's off-limits to a specific group of people who have prior examples of harassing people in that location. It's no different in concept to a restraining order. A restraining order does not make the relevant locations unavailable to everyone, only those to whom the order applies, and the bar for one being granted is not, generally, negligible.
There are genuinely concerning cases where the right to protest has been curtailed (or is trying to be) in the UK at the moment. Some of the laws proposed around restriction of protest are illiberal and overreaching. This is not one of those instances though.
Probably the most high-profile case was the Lucy Connolly one, where she posted:
> "Mass deportation now, set fire to all the fucking hotels full of the
bastards for all I care, while you’re at it take the treacherous government
and politicians with them. I feel physically sick knowing what these
families will now have to endure. If that makes me racist so be it”
For additional context (which was relevant during the prosecution and sentencing) this was posted during a time of riots and arson attacks centred on asylum accommodations, and very shortly following a highly publicised mass-murder of children which was (entirely wrongly) being blamed on asylum seekers.
She also pleaded guilty to the charged offence, rather than contesting the charge, for clarity. While not all cases will be quite like this, it is definitely not the case that - as some parties of the right have claimed - she is a free-speech martyr, a political prisoner, and so on.
If that comment meets the bar for "explicitly calling for violence", tens of Hackernews posters would be getting arrested daily for how they talk about billionaires. AOC should avoid travel to the UK because her "eat the rich" rhetoric is an explicit call for violence under this standard. Etc etc.
No, what they've done is create a low and unclear bar for what constitutes criminal speech, which allows the police and judges to apply the law selectively. So yeah maybe technically it's illegal but you won't get arrested for saying "eat the rich".
> following a highly publicised mass-murder of children which was (entirely wrongly) being blamed on asylum seekers.
The mass-murder was a consequence of the asylum system. Given what is publicly known, parents of Axel Rudakubana were overwhelmingly likely to have been asylum seekers.
> a democratically-elected official can wield the power of the state against you and harm your interests just as much as a dictator can
Really? Can they? Because in a functioning democracy you generally have recourse to courts, tertiary adjudication of various forms, a (relatively) free press that you can try and interest in taking up your story, etc. In a brutal dictatorship you're likely to have none of those, and to go missing in the night if you try and suggest that you should.
It's absolutely right to oppose politicians you disagree with - that's what political engagement is all about! But beyond a certain level, hyperbole (and the general sense of "they're all the same") simply does serve to undermine not just democracy, but any rationale for political engagement vs. simple rioting.
Well, no, more accurately, when it comes to it, it's in the eyes of a judge (or a jury in some cases). You can have all kinds of arguments about validity of arrests, of prosecutions, etc., but it's still fundamentally a system where you'll be charged with an offence and then either convicted or not.
I don't know of a single case (and don't believe anyone can point to one) where people have been arrested for simply criticising politicians. Has the number of incidents risen over recent years? Yes, and while this might be partly explained by stricter legal approaches, I suspect it's much more to do with a drastic rise in far-right activity and a consequent feeling among many that they can now say/do whatever they like with impunity (including making threatening and inflammatory remarks about minorities, and so on).
Not exactly a judge or jury. IIRC a common law assault can go on with only the subjective experience of threat. Hard to prove, but the bar is not objective. See:
True, although even those crimes (take common law assault) will still be heard in front of a magistrate - there's a process, there are processes for appealing, and it's not just some random police officer with the ability to jail you without process.
I agree that the UK has far too many laws that are more subjective than they ideally should be, but they do at least attach some level of observable and knowable process.
That would require the police to believe that an offence is likely to have been committed. While I am more than ready to criticise the police for many, many things, I'm not sure they're likely to just take that at face value... (As you've specified first contact, etc., that seems likely - of course there could be situations where such a communication would be an offence, such as in the context of a restraining/exclusion order, etc., but not in this case).
In the scenario which you've outlined, where you say "hello" to me, having never spoken to me before? No, I don't think that's an offence, but more to the point, whether I did or not, the police are unlikely to. We don't operate in a system where the police simply take the word of anyone who reports a feeling, the police have a duty to assess whether a crime has likely occurred.
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