No need to speculate that the UK government "might" one day become the bad guys: they already arrest over 30 people a day for speech that offends the prevailing political orthodoxy.
Buddy you aren't addressing the comments that are replying to you.
You gotta stay on-topic. You keep coming up with random things to compare to that make no sense to anybody but you. Who said it was legal to say "kill the king"?
Diffrence being state did not have control to stop disgruntled people from organizing. And it might be that preventing such formations is actually detrimental long run.
Everything they could was a lot less back before the fruits of industrial productivity allowed people to have their basic needs met while giving a huge fraction of their surplus to the state to do what it pleases with.
Yes, and perfect law enforcement is much worse than society than spotty law enforcement, because spotty law enforcement is how all societal progress got made.
Imagine if we jailed every gay person the moment they had a gay thought. How legal do you think being gay would be now?
This comment is remarkable in its lack of nuance. There's a huge spectrum of, let's call it, aggressive speech, ranging from trying to organize against an oppressive figure or class, to just punching down against people and groups who have either done nothing to the author of that speech which warrants an aggressive response, or where the target of that speech is already a victim.
My opinion is that free-speech absolutism is a policy position that causes much more harm than good, and which erodes social cohesion. There should be perpetual debate about where we as a society accept where the line is between speech which is allowed and that which is disallowed.
And to wit, on the tea party analogy: how's that working for the US now?
Many (perhaps even most) countries ban public acts of support for what they consider to be terrorist organisations.
For example, the USA maintains a list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and penalities for providing support to those organisations are rather more severe than the in the UK.
Whether or not Palestine Action should be proscribed is a different matter - their most serious action to date has been simply damaging military aircraft. Personally, I'd tend to say that proscription is too harsh a response for property damage with no violence against a person.
I guess in the US that anyone doing something similar would simply have been killed, rather than their organisation being banned. That's not exactly great either!
> Whether or not Palestine Action should be proscribed is a different matter
No, that's actually the heart of the matter.
Palestine Action is not a terrorist organization. Full stop. This isn't even arguable.
Labeling them a terrorist organization and then arresting anyone who expresses support for them is a massive abuse of terrorism laws and an attack on the very heart of freedom of speech.
A terrorist organisation is whatever your government says is a terrorist organisation. Always has been always will be - there's no objective measure.
He's clearly quoting the Graham Linehan case where a group of police officers arrested him for his tweets that did include the only-two-gender thing. However, as you suspected, that's not all he said. Linehan suggested in another tweet that people should punch transwomen in the face if they refuse to leave the female bathroom.
If a trans-identified male is in a female-only space,
he is committing a violent, abusive act. Make a scene,
call the cops and if all else fails, punch him in the
balls.
By inference he thinks that if someone makes you feel uncomfortable, by doing nothing illegal nor immoral (in the mind of a right-thinking person), punching their genitalia is acceptable. If I ever meet him I think I might feel quite uncomfortable, which would be unfortunate.
I'm not actually. How did you get "arrested for tweets" from my post where I said it was a video of a 20-something year old having a debate with someone at a pub?
I'll take that as confirmation that it happens all the time though - since this was evidently not an isolated case, as you have pointed out.
Unpopular opinion: your right to free speech includes the right to advocate for violence, so long as it's not imminent (as in inciting a riot).
That includes your right to support Hamas or Israel, your right to support abortion, your right to support defensive gun use, your right... well actually your right to support a lot of things given how readily innocuous things are described by opponents as "violence" or "assault".
Fortunately in the U.S. this is recognized under Brandenburg v. Ohio.
> Considering they arrest people for saying "there are only two genders"
I invite you to come try that out. You'll be fine unless you're a complete penis about it. What you should probably clock is that Graham Linehan doxxes and harasses people online with his followers brigading. If you recall the bail conditions when he got arrested was that he had to stop posting on twitter for its duration. THAT'S the headline issue, he's a publisher with a big audience. He's not just saying it at the back of a pub, and he's one of those obsessives that posts about it all the time.
Do you see the difference between what you said and what he gets in trouble for? Reducing it to just saying "there are only two genders" is taking harassment, brigading and doxxing and putting it in a nice frock so you can pretend its a victim.
I've lived in my country for decades and have added nuance to this subject. What gives you the confidence that makes you think you're better informed about my nation that I am?
The fact that you're quite clearly either ill-informed, or blinded by your own biases. I'm not sure why you keep mentioning this Graham person when I had never mentioned them. Seems like you're trying to reframe using a cherry-picked example.
Do you think someone should be arrested for sharing a meme that says f** Hamas? Or did you not know about this?
It's common knowledge that the UK is arresting people on the daily for harmless things that no one actually cares about. Should someone go to jail for saying "fuck serial killers"? Is that a hate crime too?
> Do you think someone should be arrested for sharing a meme that says f* Hamas?
If you had an idea about our laws you'd realise that's not the problematic part. The issue is under the Equalities Act 2010 religion and ethnicity are protected characteristics. So its the "fuck Islam" and "fuck off to a Muslim country..." that is problematic here.
FYI using Fox News to try to understand the UK is like trying to run air traffic control with a Fischer-Price chatter telephone. Stating that I am ill-informed or blinded by bias when citing a yank source (who by their own definition are "entertainment news") as opposed to a serious broadcaster from the UK is quite the look.
Do you not know how media works in the 21st century? They're republishing from UK sources. It was just the first hit on the SERPs because they have better SEO. Go find the original sources if you really want to. The point is that your country is putting people in prison for the dumbest reasons, and you apparently see no issue with it.
Maybe don't use a source from the 1960s then. Victim cosplay is gross, so its no surprise I don't respond to it. Find me a contemporary source if you want to compare apples to apples. You want me to respond with some mostly irrelevant reference to ancient Greece or something? Cleon probably has a couple of tangential quotes we could explore.
Yeah I know the source. Its the Torygraph. Once a mighty broadsheet but these days they print any old shit to get those boomer clicks and make them all upset. Tell them the world is falling apart to soften the blow of impending death. You're treating hospice fare as actual news you spanner.
Anybody that is worth listening to doesn't focus on the Hamas part like that source does. They focus on the parts that violate the Equalities Act 2010 because they know what they're talking about.
Please stop this. We've asked you before to observe the guidelines. HN is only a place where anyone wants to participate because others make the effort to keep the standards up rather than drag them down. We have to ban accounts that continue to act as though the standards don't apply to them. <a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html">https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I dislike harassing, threats, hate speech and everything wrong that people yell to other people.
But I dislike even more that we decide that the solution to it is to pass laws prohibiting speech, and even more that the ones in charge of passing those laws are very incentivised to prohibiting criticism to themselves or their policies or their ideologies.
Why is speech a specific, precise red line? Yelling "fire" in a crowded theatre (and I'm aware that the case which coined this phrase was completely stupid, but the phrase itself stands) should probably not be legal, even though it is speech.
Why not? If shouting “fire” causes no harm, what’s the issue? And if it causes harm, isn’t that adequately served by civil lawsuits? Not everything on earth needs to be a criminal matter.
I think in the US we have a pretty good balance of it. The problem is enforcing the laws we have, and narrowing them so strict enforcement will not be burdensome, not adding new ones.
Everyone here subconsciously understands that most laws are only intended to apply to people who regularly cause problems, and that creates an unjust system, especially when “causing problems” starts to include political activity.
I think misdirecting people to create a panic is illegal no matter what. One should always be liable for the consequences of their actions.
The line gets s lot blurrier when you call fo arson and someone acts on it and burns down a building. Should you be liable for the actions of the third party that burnt down the building? Imho there's some responsibility to be held, yes, despite you only calling for it.
But I wouldn't want anybody to wield the power to legally shut down other people. The amount of abuse that can generate in the wrong hands is Tremendous (see what I did there?)
failbuffer · · focus · HN ↗
[1] <a href="https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-are-being-thrown-in-uk-prisons-over-what-theyve-said-online-can-free-speech-be-saved/" rel="nofollow">https://www.forbes.com/sites/steveforbes/2025/09/09/people-a...
cjrp · · focus · HN ↗
erkt · · focus · HN ↗
monkey_monkey · · focus · HN ↗
enedil · · focus · HN ↗
monkey_monkey · · focus · HN ↗
Catloafdev · · focus · HN ↗
You gotta stay on-topic. You keep coming up with random things to compare to that make no sense to anybody but you. Who said it was legal to say "kill the king"?
[deleted] · · focus · HN ↗
[deleted]
UpsideDownRide · · focus · HN ↗
someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
cucumber3732842 · · focus · HN ↗
iamnothere · · focus · HN ↗
stavros · · focus · HN ↗
Imagine if we jailed every gay person the moment they had a gay thought. How legal do you think being gay would be now?
djha-skin · · focus · HN ↗
_verandaguy · · focus · HN ↗
My opinion is that free-speech absolutism is a policy position that causes much more harm than good, and which erodes social cohesion. There should be perpetual debate about where we as a society accept where the line is between speech which is allowed and that which is disallowed.
And to wit, on the tea party analogy: how's that working for the US now?
etcetcetcetceta · · focus · HN ↗
Why do you talk like that?
Are you one of the redditors that has been invading this heterodox environment.
>There's a spectrum of aggressive speech, ranging from
Is sufficient and much less cringe.
wooger · · focus · HN ↗
StrLght · · focus · HN ↗
ThrowawayTestr · · focus · HN ↗
testfrequency · · focus · HN ↗
It’s why the US has such a problem with gun control and laws.
I could argue everyone should have guns, and it’s just bad people, right?
WmWsjA6B29B4nfk · · focus · HN ↗
testfrequency · · focus · HN ↗
Let me give it a go; Switzerland has higher gun homicides than the UK.
DiogenesKynikos · · focus · HN ↗
They're dragging grannies off to prison just for holding up signs, and literally accusing them of supporting terrorism.
4ndrewl · · focus · HN ↗
NetMageSCW · · focus · HN ↗
roryirvine · · focus · HN ↗
For example, the USA maintains a list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and penalities for providing support to those organisations are rather more severe than the in the UK.
Whether or not Palestine Action should be proscribed is a different matter - their most serious action to date has been simply damaging military aircraft. Personally, I'd tend to say that proscription is too harsh a response for property damage with no violence against a person.
I guess in the US that anyone doing something similar would simply have been killed, rather than their organisation being banned. That's not exactly great either!
DiogenesKynikos · · focus · HN ↗
No, that's actually the heart of the matter.
Palestine Action is not a terrorist organization. Full stop. This isn't even arguable.
Labeling them a terrorist organization and then arresting anyone who expresses support for them is a massive abuse of terrorism laws and an attack on the very heart of freedom of speech.
4ndrewl · · focus · HN ↗
DiogenesKynikos · · focus · HN ↗
They called PA a terrorist organization, which is an insult to everyone's intelligence.
Then they carried out mass arrests of people protesting that decision.
Democracies don't do that.
liveoneggs · · focus · HN ↗
nullbio · · focus · HN ↗
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DavidNielsen · · focus · HN ↗
GJim · · focus · HN ↗
Citation please.
(EDIT: Citation of an arrest just for saying that, not an arrest for incitement.)
tredre3 · · focus · HN ↗
dspillett · · focus · HN ↗
znoalna · · focus · HN ↗
nullbio · · focus · HN ↗
I'll take that as confirmation that it happens all the time though - since this was evidently not an isolated case, as you have pointed out.
failbuffer · · focus · HN ↗
That includes your right to support Hamas or Israel, your right to support abortion, your right to support defensive gun use, your right... well actually your right to support a lot of things given how readily innocuous things are described by opponents as "violence" or "assault".
Fortunately in the U.S. this is recognized under Brandenburg v. Ohio.
Quarrelsome · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
nullbio · · focus · HN ↗
[dead]
Quarrelsome · · focus · HN ↗
> Considering they arrest people for saying "there are only two genders"
I invite you to come try that out. You'll be fine unless you're a complete penis about it. What you should probably clock is that Graham Linehan doxxes and harasses people online with his followers brigading. If you recall the bail conditions when he got arrested was that he had to stop posting on twitter for its duration. THAT'S the headline issue, he's a publisher with a big audience. He's not just saying it at the back of a pub, and he's one of those obsessives that posts about it all the time.
Do you see the difference between what you said and what he gets in trouble for? Reducing it to just saying "there are only two genders" is taking harassment, brigading and doxxing and putting it in a nice frock so you can pretend its a victim.
I've lived in my country for decades and have added nuance to this subject. What gives you the confidence that makes you think you're better informed about my nation that I am?
nullbio · · focus · HN ↗
<a href="https://www.foxnews.com/world/blogger-arrested-sharing-anti-hamas-meme-online-claims-cops-know-october-7th-horrors" rel="nofollow">https://www.foxnews.com/world/blogger-arrested-sharing-anti-...
Do you think someone should be arrested for sharing a meme that says f** Hamas? Or did you not know about this?
It's common knowledge that the UK is arresting people on the daily for harmless things that no one actually cares about. Should someone go to jail for saying "fuck serial killers"? Is that a hate crime too?
Quarrelsome · · focus · HN ↗
If you had an idea about our laws you'd realise that's not the problematic part. The issue is under the Equalities Act 2010 religion and ethnicity are protected characteristics. So its the "fuck Islam" and "fuck off to a Muslim country..." that is problematic here.
FYI using Fox News to try to understand the UK is like trying to run air traffic control with a Fischer-Price chatter telephone. Stating that I am ill-informed or blinded by bias when citing a yank source (who by their own definition are "entertainment news") as opposed to a serious broadcaster from the UK is quite the look.
nullbio · · focus · HN ↗
Do you not know how media works in the 21st century? They're republishing from UK sources. It was just the first hit on the SERPs because they have better SEO. Go find the original sources if you really want to. The point is that your country is putting people in prison for the dumbest reasons, and you apparently see no issue with it.
Quarrelsome · · focus · HN ↗
Maybe don't use a source from the 1960s then. Victim cosplay is gross, so its no surprise I don't respond to it. Find me a contemporary source if you want to compare apples to apples. You want me to respond with some mostly irrelevant reference to ancient Greece or something? Cleon probably has a couple of tangential quotes we could explore.
Yeah I know the source. Its the Torygraph. Once a mighty broadsheet but these days they print any old shit to get those boomer clicks and make them all upset. Tell them the world is falling apart to soften the blow of impending death. You're treating hospice fare as actual news you spanner.
Anybody that is worth listening to doesn't focus on the Hamas part like that source does. They focus on the parts that violate the Equalities Act 2010 because they know what they're talking about.
nullbio · · focus · HN ↗
tomhow · · focus · HN ↗
nullbio · · focus · HN ↗
> HN is only a place where anyone wants to participate because others make the effort to keep the standards up
Point well taken.
tomhow · · focus · HN ↗
PowerElectronix · · focus · HN ↗
But I dislike even more that we decide that the solution to it is to pass laws prohibiting speech, and even more that the ones in charge of passing those laws are very incentivised to prohibiting criticism to themselves or their policies or their ideologies.
someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
iamnothere · · focus · HN ↗
someonebaggy · · focus · HN ↗
iamnothere · · focus · HN ↗
Everyone here subconsciously understands that most laws are only intended to apply to people who regularly cause problems, and that creates an unjust system, especially when “causing problems” starts to include political activity.
PowerElectronix · · focus · HN ↗
The line gets s lot blurrier when you call fo arson and someone acts on it and burns down a building. Should you be liable for the actions of the third party that burnt down the building? Imho there's some responsibility to be held, yes, despite you only calling for it.
But I wouldn't want anybody to wield the power to legally shut down other people. The amount of abuse that can generate in the wrong hands is Tremendous (see what I did there?)