I read the posts. He's obviously writing daily updates and posts and includes pictures from his travels.

The photos are obviously target shooting. This is a common sport in many countries.

Your argument is that because he wrote long daily updates about what he was doing and included two unrelated things, that he's implying that the guns are for those offhand remarks?

We get getting farther and farther from the real problem, which is that the UK police have been weaponized to respond to people's social media posts about how they make others feel. That's a ridiculously low bar.

From https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/consultant-arrested-posi...

> However, he said that a police officer later visited his home to warn him that concerns had been raised about the post.

> "I was told to be careful what I say online and I need to understand how it makes people feel," he said.

> Hopefully you can understand why the guy who owes him money would feel intimidated and call the police, and you can see why there appears to be enough evidence to charge the guy for harrassing the ower, and to arrest him so you can establish if he possesses the guns he has posted himself shooting.

No, I don't understand why he would.

Nothing there was intimidation. Pretending it is intimidation is stretching crudility. The fact that he got arrested over this is straight up nonsense, IMO.

All the posts read like blog-style posts, and there wasn't any aggressive language used there at all. He also mentioned he was meeting with people to resolve the issue through legal means in the posts.

I suspect the owner who owed him money was acting maliciously.

> You want to say POLICE POLICE POLICE were chilling speech here. Bullshit.

You're the only person in this thread using the phrase "chilling speech" and you keep admitting that they did.

Let me quote you on this topic:

> The chilling effect the police had, a wrong in and of itself,

> In the case of the journalist Arday reported in 2025, police again did not arrest or charge him, but they (wrongly, in my opinion) phoned him and asked him not to contact Arday. This had a chilling effect

> For all three reports, police chose to take no action (nonetheless it still had a chilling effect on speech).

These are all three your own quotes from this thread. The last quote isn't even accurate because the police DID take action in the form of contacting the journalist and telling him to desist.

Here's the full text of what you said. It's what we're talking about:

> There was also the tragic story of the Cambridge professor who was completely unqualified and had a fake life story. When journalists would get close to the story he would report them to the police for harassment to spike the stories.

You don't mention the threat that civil lawsuits pose to speech at all. And yet it was the threat of a civil lawsuit that actually quelled speech here.

You have no evidence that action A ("he would report them to the police for harassment") led to outcome B ("to spike the stories").

Jason Arday did not spike any journalist's story by reporting them for harrassment. He, or his universty, did spike the story by engaging reputation lawyers. He could do that in almost any country, including the US, despite its stronger free speech laws. Unless a US state has an effective anti-SLAPP law, it is very likely all that is needed to shut people up is to threaten a lawsuit they can't afford.

The thing you want to be mad about -- the police unlawfully instructing a journalist not to contact someone -- is a bad thing, is not even legal (i.e. the UK state doesn't actually allow it, let alone condone it), and it had no effect on the journalist. They still wanted their story published. It was the private threat of a lawsuit that spiked it.

“Getting the police involved” is a lot less exciting in the UK compared to the US. Our police don’t have a nasty habit of getting scared in the dark and shooting anything that moves. Mostly because most officers in the UK don’t carry firearms, and the UK often struggles to recruit officers into firearms units because officers just don’t want to mess with guns.

As a result getting the police involved is often little more than a slightly awkward chat at the front door where the officers politely ask you to stop being arsehole, but everyone knows the police are a bit limited in what they can actual do. Either because no crime has actually been committed, or because they don’t really have the time to properly investigate even if a crime had been committed.

Actually getting arrested takes some effort. The police really don’t want to deal with all the paperwork and mess that comes afterwards if they can avoid it.

"account" appears to be a simple autocorrect typo of "count" since the other half of the sentence is about "count"

Same question as always. What were the lies? Because all the ones I've seen were either found to be true or they were exaggerated versions of statements and then attacking that as a lie.

Especially rich to talk about habitual liars when it's a bunch of British press outlets and activists accusing others of being liars.

I don't get why you're making excuses for this stuff. Trump is one kind of bad, but almost all western governments are increasingly unaccountable to their voters. And these are usually the folks that claim to be defenders of democracy. The hypocrisy is breathtaking.

>because no one gets excited about the government apparently doing nothing.

Well yes. Precisely because the government was "doing nothing" while issues that plagued the voting population like migration, wealth disparity and affordability crisis were constantly growing for the past ~15 years until it reached breaking point.

Hence why people affected by this are now voting to give the new extremist parties a chance at the helm, because just voting more "doing nothing" by the parties who stood by and enabled this, just guarantees the same issues aggravating. So then what else do you expect to happen at the elections?

A system where the government is chosen by 33% of voters has no legitimate claim to be democracy, that is, rule by the people.

Last time I'm aware the monarch did something, it was the firing of the entire Australian parliament and calling a snap election. Which is quite a sensible thing to do if parliament is completely jammed, and since it was reasonably sensible and popular in the situation it happened, nothing happened to the monarch. (Imagine if someone had the power to do that to Congress! Maybe they'd actually do stuff again, and we'd have to rename them to Progress)

This is an alright use of a monarch IMO.

> What is the actual purpose of freedom of expression in a democracy? Is it being able to call people N-word online with no repercussions, or is it being able to organise, form political parties, and change the country?

What is the difference between the two? Because you're going to make a cultural argument and NOT a legal one. The C-word is one you throw around (and the Aussies to) but would cause an American woman be pretty upset. You seem perfectly fine with its use, but we frown on both terms socially but they are strictly legal.

Defamation VS political speech would be a better comparison, and I could make the argument that Americans being more lenient are better off with our freedoms.

From your list of purposes about freedom of expression, you're missing "the ability to criticize powerful individuals". If you cannot prove, in a court of law, that your statements are 100% true, you can absolutely lose your shirt in a defamation suit in the UK. It's so egregious that the US had to pass a law specifically shielding American free speech from the UK's libel laws. (to their credit, in 2013 they improved their laws substantially, such that you can no longer be found liable for provably true statements)

In the US, in contrast, you can say pretty much anything, as long as it plausibly enough true that the plaintiff can't prove you don't believe it. "Donald Trump is a child rapist" is an example of speech that would not be protected in UK courts. Sure, I can point at all his visits to Epstein's Island, and his running child pageant shows, and complaints made against him to establish that it's not unreasonable to believe it, but I cannot prove in a court of law that he did it. So in the UK, he would win a defamation suit against me. On the flip side, here in the States that is quite safe to say in a public forum. It's quite difficult to prove a negative, and even if they passed that bar, they would then need to prove to a court that I did not believe that statement.

On some Twitter ripoff site called "x.com" actually

Please explain the constitutional limits to Parliament in more detail.

The result seems substantially more chaotic.

And then there is the fact that the entire legal frame work is based on The Crown. If the king or queen killed someone they would have to prosecute themselves. This is the exact opposite of democracy.

The leader of the party stepping down (for non-medical reasons) should trigger an election. The fact that it doesn't is scandalous. We have the same problems in Canada where we elected a minority Liberal government that has now magically turned into a majority due to legislators switching parties. How can someone flip from the opposition party to the ruling one and still claim to be representing the will of the people who voted for them?

You cannot compare these eras, where one offers a zeitgeist of scientific progress and opportunity and the other of global scale problems met with ignorance and stagnation.

The tides will turn in china, once that positive notion gets suffocated by misaligned elites.

> for the first time since the post-WWII order, they are threatened by a real regime change.

It's only new if you are blind to post-WWII history.

In the western world alone, there was no shortage of incredibly vicious fights with communist/socialist groups in in post-war Europe (Most prominently in Italy and Greece), to say nothing of the various domestic decolonisation movements (The British and French governments were scared shitless of them), secessionist movements in Quebec, Spain, that entire thing in North Ireland (the understatement of the century), the Civil Rights and universal suffrage movement in the US, collapse of prominent dictatorships in Portugal and Spain...

State-threatening social upheaval is nothing new, we just have a particularly shitty flavour of it right now, as fascism and fascist-adjacent movements are currently waxing.