? you think police officers came in the middle of night to an old defenseless grandmother about her post showing discomfort about labour politicians as simply fun partying debates ?
what did they go to her home for ? sipping champagne , taking care of the old woman and having oxford like debates ???
I don't think they came in "the middle of the night", full stop. That's just another embellishment you've pulled out of thin air. I think if you had a strong case, you wouldn't need embellish it so.
> Detectives were last night accused of acting like East Germany's feared Stasi secret police for quizzing Helen Jones over her calls for the resignation of local councillors embroiled in the WhatsApp scandal exposed by The Mail on Sunday.
The article says clearly “last night”, what you think happened doesn’t change what was said by the woman who explicitly stated what happened to her and had to live through it that night.
(on rechecking yes i’m wrong about daytime vs nighttime indeed they visited at morning)
but even with that you think its acceptable if it’s daytime for police to knock on doors due to facebook posts about not liking current ruling councillor stuck in a scandal ???
if this gets politically acceptable get ready for china like atmosphere in future around politics (without china like infrastructure or growth) forced disappearances , thoughtcrimes & thought police…
The doorcam footage is clearly in broad daylight, it's dated February, and further down the article it says:
> At around 1.30pm last Tuesday ... a detective sergeant and another officer knocked at her door
You've made some edits to your post since I replied, so...
> but even with that you think its acceptable if it’s daytime for police to knock on doors due to facebook posts
It's handled on a case by case basis. The police will generally notify someone if they're the subject of a harrassment complaint, and it's not uncommon for them to visit either to give a verbal warning or to advise them on the law. That's... just how the system works in the UK and has done for a long time. Police in the UK are often in and around the community, working with it and giving out advice where it may help to prevent crimes.
Perhaps the police were too keen to visit in person this time. Perhaps they felt pressured to demonstrate a response by the fact that the complainant was linked to the council. That's another issue entirely. But this single incident is not the sign of a steep decline into authoritarianism that you want it to be.
That is saying that last night the detectives were accused, not that they visited the woman last night.
Also note it doesn't say who is making this accusation about the detectives, the article is not designed to inform you but to provoke a reaction.
Also consider that they will be carefully selecting what posts of hers to quote rather than telling you everything she wrote that lead to the complaint.
Many European countries also have "election silence", basically a blanked ban on political speech, usually for a day or two before and during an election. This is supposedly done to "give people space to deliberate without undue influence."
When such laws were introduced, they basically only applied to mainstream media organizations and actual political agitators; debating politics at the family table was (and still is) allowed. However, the way they're worded, they also apply to any user sharing / liking political posts on social media.
No, still doesn’t change what’s true and is reality.
its unfortunate left wing bias in mainstream media has atrophied the ability for any reliable news media to exist with extensive coverage and neutral reporting. (not unique to the left, right wing actors can do just the same it’s just right now left leaning political actors control most of legacy mainstream media)
Foreign actors are definitely taking advantage of that to fuel tensions as much as they can. Doesnt change reality tho.
That UK has a severe free speech issue and two tier policing, one for native brits(the lower tier) and one for politicians and favoured religious vote banks.
Even if mainstream media had a left wing bias - which is a big stretch in the UK given that it's mostly owned by Rothermere, Murdoch, Barclay and Marshall - why would that prevent reliable and neutral media from existing?
it is not a left or right wing thing, these events are happening.
Even the US Vice President alluded to this happening.
Are all UK opposition politicians right wing tabloid dummies too ? They are all clearly saying this is happening. Reform UK party that is right now slated in polls to be the next winner if elections were to happen have publicly acknowledged this is happening.
Why make everything into a left vs right match ? if free speech dies here right now by people you support (people who call daily mail a tabloid “right wing” rag) when they go out of power and people you oppose win, they’ll use the same instruments to suppress people you do support.
Basic freedoms are deserved by all citizens, police shouldn’t go around arresting 12,000 citizens for facebook posts or grandmas for voicing their worries not even violent posts or jibes, just criticism and concerns.
While the same country has struggled across years to arrest and prosecute violent offenders targetting british orphanages and harming children. police did nothing about it despite knowing it, and continues to resist protecting children.
You think everything is normal ?
Not everything is a football match, the score wont reset after “the game” round is over. Once these freedoms are lost they will be far more harder to bring back. people will be even more defenseless. Nothing good comes out of making everything expendable in a left vs right match.
Common citizens lose everything from it, while politicians on top from both aisles win with more power to do anything and everything they want when they rule.
Sure, I hope those texts act as warm blanket to console you as western society loses its hard earned freedoms from the rise of extreme left and extreme right.
You’ll need them, much more than I will
To realise where things went wrong.
you’ll need it for consoling if most people dont wake up and realise that the masses are slowly losing all of their freedoms from both the extreme left and extreme right in democracies globally.
Democratic backsliding is a fact that’s happening in all major countries.
No media literacy course will save us all from it, if we don’t call out these issues and make it unpopular to do these things by governments.
So you think everything and everyone across the world is making a politically coordinated event to lie about reality ?
I don’t even vote for the republicans and since when has couches been equated to real things reported widely by media, politicians, citizens, watchdog groups become completely irrelevant because a politician you hate/dislike agreed with those things.
This is not a football match or he said she said, it’s happening and if you have to resort to calling a sitting vice president as “couch**” to deny reality instead of being able to clearly state no one innocent is being jailed for simple disagreements on facebook. then no you probably subconsciously know it’s happening too and need to depend on slander to deny reality.
it is especially ironic considering there are uk citizens getting police visits for saying things far less rude than what you said about US vice president.
You can disagree with ones politics but if you want to defend your ability to have that freedom (to disagree with ruling parties) it does require you to defend the freedoms and rights of people you disagree with politically too…
> So you think everything and everyone across the world is making a politically coordinated event to lie about reality ?
In a word, yes. More nuanced would say that anyone in power is willing to lie and make a politically coordinated event to lie about reality if it helps their agenda. More specifically, I would have you look at current US Administration as the greatest example. They are not the first nor only ones to do this, but they are the most brazen in their use of it
>because the couch fucker sure is known to be trustworthy
Just because he's a "couch fucker", doesn't mean he's wrong in that case. Some EU countries do have genuine issues with free speech. He's right about that one.
People should use critical thinking and judge WHAT is being
said independent of WHO is saying it.
Unfortunately people do not use critical thinking anymore to judge topics in a nonpartisan way, because of fear of being attacked/ostracized by the colective groupthink mob based solely on adherence to a political ideology.
Isn't it using critical thinking to be able to know that a particular source of information is not credible after said source admitted to be "willing to create stories” after falsely claiming a certain population was eating people's pets?
I think it'd be worth double- and triple-checking anything he says, yes, beyond trivial examples about the color of the sky. He's a known liar. He lies for political gain. He is disgusting.
>I think it'd be worth double- and triple-checking anything he says
That's what I'm advocating for, but people I was replying to didn't even want to do that and were dismissing anything out of the box just because they don't like the source, which is detrimental to any honest and useful debate.
>He's a known liar. He lies for political gain. He is disgusting.
I never said he doesn't lie, of course he does, he's a politician, all of them lie, but even a broken clock is right twice a day.
I said some of the things he says are bang on the money and shouldn't be discarded on the basis that the information comes from a mouth you don't like, as that's just closed minded partisan zealotry and not using critical thinking.
But of course they should be discarded. Why shouldn't they? There are better sources and better people sharing opinions.
Maybe we can take what he says seriously if he comes clean about his past dangerous lies. Until then, he should at the very least be shunned if not ignored entirely.
>But of course they should be discarded. Why shouldn't they?
I rest my case. There's no point in arguing with zealots who don't want to even listen to reason let alone critically analyze information shared with them, but choose to automatically believe and disbelieve it based on their favorite or hated source.
>There are better sources and better people sharing opinions
Your "better sources" might be someone else's "worst sources". Where is that universal ground truth located at? Isn't that discovered though conversation, argumentation and debate like in university campuses, instead of blindly trusting your favorite partisan source? That's no different than religious zealotry that burned Galileo at the stake for saying thins considered "untrue" at the time.
> Even the US Vice President alluded to this happening
gives zero additional weight to the credibility of the claim. He's someone who has openly acknowledged about lying for political gain.
"If I have to create stories...then that's what I'm going to do."
He directly says he will lie to you and make up stories to drive his political agenda. He's not even trying to suggest he's representing reality; he's making up stories, telling fiction.
If any news organization openly admits they're going to continue to just write blatant lies to push their agenda, would you continue trusting that source?
I do agree, free speech is far less protected in many European countries than it is in the US. I don't doubt there are plenty of crazy stories of someone getting arrested for their speech in some places in Europe. But JD Vance telling me any specific story about it and I don't see much else making the same claims, my default is to assume it's probably untrue, because he told me he will lie to me. Why would I trust his statements?
Ah yes, but were they really people's pets? They just claimed people were eating animals commonly owned as pets. Even in my neighborhood, there are plenty of cats that are not owned by anyone. "They're eating the dogs. They're eating the cats." That's the quote I'm familiar. I've never heard "They're eating the pet dogs. They're eating the pet cats." Isn't that a difference that a critical thinker would be able to notice?
Claiming they're eating cats and dogs, regardless of pet status, is incredibly racist. Trying to say "Nooo he meant strays" is not critical thinking. It's excusing horribly racist ideology and talking points.
