At least we have an interesting (if terrifying) political world to distract us from our team being crap at football!
The status of the media is irrelevant. If your position is that people have free speech where they aren't physically prevented from speaking then it follows that no state has ever restricted free speech. Which is plainly an absurd position.
It is how the law works in the UK. Given your analogy it is completely relevant, though the judicial system perhaps more so. You have the right to say what you like in the UK. If through that you have incited others to commit a crime, that is what the crime is. I like that we have a law that gives a consequence to inciting racial and religious hatred for example. I think those are bad things.
Us has interfered all over the place. This is why I question the "Russian interference" narrative. All "major" and a lot of non major with affiliation to a major are doing it. This narrative that the Russians are better at it is for the birds.....IMO. The US is full of bot activity! Just that with the western world being the good guys it is all ignored. I actually have contacts with people that work with bots. Not Russian folks but not through that being a conscious decision. Lot of bot experts in India and Brazil but the majority are US based.
To use analogy, you are comparing an egg sandwich with a cow. I’m being flippant, but you are correctly stating that the UK and US were very good at manipulating other states before the digital world. Tough to support those actions. What I was alluding to was that in terms of manipulating social media our agencies were behind the curve.
I like the same as you on your final line. The problem is trying to expand the definitions of the law to encapsulate all sorts of "dissent" instead of sticking to the actual bad guys.
I do too at a variety of levels and you are completely right that the US does it too at an alarming level, same with India dn Brazil. Spot on. Russia did manage to weaponise it early
I would read the legislation if I were you. I think you would likely agree with the vast majority of it.
I would probably agree with most of the legislation, just the judicial interpretations that tend to get me riled! Hence why we have problems with ECHR that other countries in the EU don't have despite being in the ECHR. It is more the interpretations of our laws that is the problem than the laws themselves.
This part in bold is plainly not true (and frankly isn't true anywhere). No reasonable person understands the phrase "you have the right to do X" to mean that. If you can be sent to prison for doing something then you do not have the right to do it and are not free to do it. By that logic I have the right to kill people in the UK, it's just I face the consequence of being imprisoned for life if I do. But nobody would say you have the right to kill people in the UK.
Once again I will say.. the Nazis The soviets Also pretended that they were locking people up for the same reason. Americans that spoke up against prohibition and against slavery were also locked up. A lot of the time, what the state considers ‘lawful’ is not actually morally correct. In this case, many people are calling our examples of two tier policing and where our own justice system is being used against us. However loading etc refuse to see this. They see the state’s word as gospel; even when it is morally bankrupt
The problem is that there are those that will say what they want anywhere as is their right, but there has been an increasing amount that self censor over the past 10-20 years purely because they do not think they can say what they like, hence pressure from society and authority leads to people not feeling able to be free to speak.
At the end of the day, nobody has ever gone to jail for saying something that wasn’t super ****y. So **** them.
The relevance is that you still believe/trust in the EHCR and its regulations as the arbiter of truth and all that is moral. Simply put; you are a lemming in much the same way as the population of Germany in the 30s. You fail to see that the state/goverment is the enemy.
water off a ducks back I’m not directing this, but insults tend to happen when you are stuck in the confirmation bias loop. It’s the same with the hyperbole.
