Comment by linuxftw

Comment by linuxftw 6 hours ago

33 replies

Many people are saying this is symbolic and cannot be enforced. Unfortunately, that's just not true. Look at what happened to the founder of Telegram. Some jurisdiction decides you're violating their laws, all you need to do is catch a connecting flight or take a vacation on their soil or a place that will eagerly extradite, and you're a political prisoner.

What happens if one of the officers of 4Chan or Gab is on a flight to Paris and the plane is redirected to London? Well, they're going to prison. The UK is a police state.

fair_enough 6 hours ago

That is a good point I completely overlooked: your international flight can get redirected to a country you never intended to visit.

ddalex 6 hours ago

It has been known that certain middle east countries force passengers crafts to divert and land to get their hands on wanted people

  • cma 5 hours ago

    I'm pretty sure the US and Europe do this as well, Evo Morales grounding incident:

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evo_Morales_grounding_incident

    • fair_enough 4 hours ago

      I still cannot believe the Geneva Conventions allowed this. This should have ended with John Kerry and Jen Psaki in a Swiss prison for at least 10 years, if not Barack Obama himself. We managed to convict accused war criminals with a lot less evidence in the Nuremburg trials. FOR EMPHASIS: I'm not comparing the severity of the crimes, I'm comparing the evidentiary basis for securing convictions.

      "It may be dangerous to be America's enemy, but to be America's friend is fatal." -Henry Kissinger

      • ben_w 3 hours ago

          The Geneva Conventions are international humanitarian laws consisting of four treaties and three additional protocols that establish international legal standards for humanitarian treatment in war.
        
        -- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geneva_Conventions

        What would those have to do with "intelligence contractor leaked our stuff, might be on the Bolivian president's plane, oh no a diplomatic incident"?

tonyedgecombe 5 hours ago

> The UK is a police state.

No it isn’t.

  • haunter 4 hours ago

    It's a nanny state which is even worse

    • ben_w 3 hours ago

      Criminal 1: "Quick, hide the money!"

      Criminal 2: "Coppers?"

      Criminal 1: "Worse. Nannies."

      Nah, it's not worse.

    • pessimizer 3 hours ago

      It's a nanny state with the police arresting and jailing people for tweets. It's a police state, but "we" like to identify police states with Russians, Chinese, and Iranians, or whoever the state's enemy is at the moment.

      When police show up to your door and ask you to apologize to people for causing distress, and to consider not speaking from now on, you live in a police state. When you have banned political parties and organizations that trigger the mass arrests of peaceful protestors, you live in a police state. People who are comfortable with what is being suppressed never think of their country as a police state. At least until something happens to them or someone they care about, when they suddenly become "activists."

      • KaiserPro 2 hours ago

        > you live in a police state.

        sigh You've not lived in a police state, or more accurately, you've been online too much to actually get context.

        In the UK threatening to kill someone has been illegal since at least ~1880 something. Going online an publicly calling for the death of one or more person (which in the eyes of the law is pretty close to sending a good old paper death threat) is not only widely considered a dick move, its illegal.

        Now, How do you enforce that? the police investigate, and if its deemed a credible threat, you are visited by the plod. Who most likley go "look mate, don't be a dick".

        If you are really being a dick, you might be cautioned (taken to the police station and told "you're being a shit")

        The next stage up is appearing in court.

        And then you have to be convicted by a jury of your peers, and the burden of evidence is really quite high. ("oh but that mum, she was innocent." I advise you to read all that she wrote, you know the extra bits that the sun can't print)

        Its not like you're bundled into the back of a van by masked goons who refuse to identify themselves. Taken to a mass detention centre and not seen for weeks, and then yeeted to an illegal jail.

        But why are the police investigating social media?

        Now thats a good question. And the answer is: Musk doesn't moderate. Stuff that gets you a visit from the plod is generally against the community standards of social media, even X.

        Now to your point here: "When police show up to your door and ask you to apologize to people for causing distress"

        I've had a visit from the police, why? because I was young and being an antisocial shit. The police were not actually there to arrest me, and I don't think they could actually if they wanted to. The point was, they were there to make the town liveable for all it's citizens. I was "fucking around", and the police were gently telling me that I'd really not like to "find out".

        "OH BUT PERSONAL FREEDOM". Now, the thing is, I was perfectly free to carry on my bad ways. The problem was, those ways, had they descended further, would have resulted in jail time. The choice was mine.

        I don't want to live in a country where its acceptable to bully whomever I like, in the guise of personal freedom. Sure, speak your mind, but don't be a dick about it.

kijin 5 hours ago

Durov's plane wasn't redirected to France, nor were the French planning to extradite him anywhere else for all we know. He willingly landed his own private jet in Paris.

I understand what point you're trying to make, but Protasevich would have been a better example. Beware of whose airspace you fly over.

  • tomku 3 hours ago

    Durov is also, relevantly, a naturalized French citizen in addition to his various other passports. It's not just "some jurisdiction", it's one he opted into!

foldr 4 hours ago

Enforcing bad legislation that was enacted through the democratic process doesn’t make a country a police state. It’s just the rule of law. That has always included the enforcement of bad laws as well as good ones.

  • pessimizer 3 hours ago

    > the democratic process

    There's no such thing. There are many different processes that some people consider democratic and others don't. But "democratic" has no other meaning than rule by the governed. It is not a description of a specific political process. Especially one that bans leading opposition candidates, which is clearly as undemocratic as anything that can occur in government. If a population wants to vote in somebody who is currently in prison for crimes they are obviously guilty of, preventing them from doing it is a direct repudiation of democracy.

    Even killing opposition candidates is marginally more democratic, because at least that only lasts for an instant. Saying that people cannot vote for the government of their choice is a restriction on the governed, not a restriction on people who want to govern.

    • foldr an hour ago

      The UK does not ‘ban’ leading opposition candidates. The largest opposition party in Parliament is the Conservatives; Kemi Badenoch is not banned. The opposition party leading in the polls is Reform; Nigel Farage is not banned.

  • linuxftw 4 hours ago

    The UK locks up political dissidents under draconian 'safety' laws.

    • KaiserPro 2 hours ago

      > The UK locks up political dissidents under draconian 'safety' laws.

      We used to just out and out shoot them.

      We used to demand that they have their voices literally overdubbed by an actor.

      We used to round people up and jail them for being too irish.

      We used to be in a civil war, up until the 2000s.

      You're just having a cyberpunk wet dream. Don't get me wrong, the OSA is an abomination. but you are being a hyperbolic child, especially as actual authoritarianism is happening in the USA, without anything as a peep from the same blowhards talking about the OSA.

      • linuxftw an hour ago

        You're absolutely right, the UK has always been despotic. And that's just at home, to say nothing about the colonies.

    • foldr 4 hours ago

      You don’t refer to any specific cases so I can’t offer any specific response, but the key phrase is

      > under ___ laws.

      A police state is one where the police arrest whoever the government directs them to arrest (rather than enforcing the law). Keir Starmer is not phoning up Police chiefs to get people disappeared.

      • linuxftw 4 hours ago

        The laws are whatever the UK's kangaroo courts decide they are. It's a total police state.

ben_w 2 hours ago

> The UK is a police state.

The UK is further from being a police state than the USA is.

And despite what Trump has been doing, both are nowhere near being that.

I mean, UK cops aren't even routinely given firearms… and the cops themselves don't want to change that.

  • linuxftw 7 minutes ago

    I'll be the first to tell you, police in the USA are absolute tyrants. You can be killed for mouthing off to the police here, and likely nothing will happen to them.

    We don't jail people for tweets though.

basisword 4 hours ago

This is supposed to be a surprise? You break the law in a country, and then visit that country, and - shock - they arrest you.