London’s Metropolitan Police arrested another 492 people over the weekend after a protest Saturday in Trafalgar Square, as the Starmer government accelerated its crackdown on opposition to the Gaza genocide.
The entirely peaceful protest was held to oppose the proscription of Palestine Action. It was organised by Defend Our Juries and attended by over 1,000 people. Of the arrests, 488 were for holding up signs declaring, “I oppose genocide. I support Palestine Action”.
UK is a fascist regime. Well done!
Real question:
Im going tongo tin foil haters a bit with the implication:
If you have a faist government why not just bring back the royal family as the leaders?
I get that facism is different than monarchism but many of the key distinctions aren’t that significant imo, in that they both lean heavily towards autocracy and both Aggressively punish dissent.
Folks who get really up in their feelings about the Trump/Harris election seem to forget that Harris was taking campaign advice from this guy. It’s so easy to forget how absolutely poisoned so-called “Liberal Democracy” has become with a broad strain of fascist tendency.
On the one hand, you’ve got a guy who is looking to literally lay siege to cities in the US that didn’t vote for him. On the opposite side of the pond, they’re doing mass-arrests of anyone with a “Please Stop Killing Brown People” bumper sticker. And in the middle, a sea of smug dipshits posting “You got what you voted for”.
Liberals will ALWAYS end up siding with the Fascists to try to suppress the Left. Happened in Germany in the 1930s, and the dumbass liberals eventually ended up lined up against the same walls the communists and socialists were lined up against. If you’re a liberal today and defending this fascist suppression against Palestine Action: you’re next.
Happened in the 1910s, even. Hence the old quip about Bernie Sanders killing Rosa Luxemburg.
Or marched out into the snows of Russia to seize more Lebensraum for the imperial core. Or just bombed to death in Dresden or Berlin when the front lines collapsed.
The hard math of living in a fascist state is standing up and getting shot today or ducking and hiding in hopes you won’t get shot tomorrow.
Liberals made their bed back in 2009. We’re all just living in the aftermath.
I’d argue that the Liberals are a little farther down the line. This administration isn’t finished bullying women, intellectuals, non-Caucasians and the queer community to death, they’re just getting started.
And then there’s the Americans, for whom literally everything has to be about America in some way or another.
Have you seen their fiction? Even in sci-fi, they’re the center of the fucking universe. Galactic Space Empire HQ, located in NYC/LA/San Francisco of course.
I mean… After the USSR fell, the US was the only major player in space for like 25 years, until China finally started to dabble the last few years.
It’s not necessarily an ego stroke to extrapolate from that point.
But also, the media is targeted at American viewers. Of course they’re going to use familiar cities.
Do you also complain that doctor who, despite being able to travel anywhere in the both the universe AND time, lands in modern day UK so often?
I do find it offensive that every time the Doctor and companions land in the US, everyone is a gun-toting dumbass.
I mean, it’s accurate, but still offensive somehow!
All authors are like that. You write about what you know, that way you save yourself lots of research and mistakes.
As opposed to British fiction where everything os centered around London? George Orwell thought London would be the center of the Anglo-American axis back in 1948 while the British Empire crumbled around him.
What? He called it “Airstrip One”.
Your point being? Do you think Orwell named the UK after a US air force call sign that wouldn’t be coined until after his death? I won’t be lectured on literature by someone who has the media comprehension of a middle schooler.
Well, according to my middle school media comprehension the implication of the name “Airstrip One” is that the island of Great Britain acts as a bulwark against or potential invasion staging post to Eurasia, as it did in the Second World War. London is far from the Imperial Centre in that story, though there is no clear capital of Oceania and Ingsoc. Orwell’s pessimistic view of the UK’s future is as a province of the American Empire.
Similar issue, yes. It’s said that you should write what you know, my point is more that Americans seem incapable of producing fiction where the lower 48 aren’t the nexus of the universe, not that the British weren’t also doing the same thing centuries earlier.
Aliens sure seem to visit London all the god damn time in Dr. Who. People write literature about the places and people they know. Why would an American write a book about aliens visiting Berlin?
Also, how long ago do you think 1948 was? Because it wasn’t “centuries” ago. And the most prominent American sci-fi authors do not have their stories revolve around the US. The Foundation, Dune, Star Wars, and the Expanse were all written by American authors and only one of them has any characters from the USA
1948 was before black people were given equal rights in the US, so as far as I am concerned it should have been centuries ago. Stop dick measuring with the previous garbage empire like their shortcomings somehow excuse your own.
edit:
Was it my support of civil rights or my pointing out how silly it is to compare yourself to a condemnable empire as a defense that made you mad?
I would love to discuss German, Indian, and Chinese sci-fi, but none of it seems to be very popular on the international stage so unfortunately we can’t discuss it. The guy i responded to complained that American media focuses so much on America, while citing only Star Trek, but that’s literally how media is in every country, so i cited British media because that’s what i am familiar with as i am a dual citizen of both countries.
And perhaps associating the racist policies living people grew up with as something that happened centuries ago is why we can’t make much progress today.
Americans own the world. Everyone else just lives in it.
That might have been true 40 years ago but those times are gone, you just haven’t realised it yet
What about the other 160 or so democracies? How they doin?
Especially the proportional representation ones. FPTP is just a hint of democracy.
I’m not sure where you’re getting your numbers, but…
I’m counting far less than 160.
Sure. But then IRV still gave us NYC Eric Adams as mayor of New York. There’s more to democracy than the shape of your ballot.
Calling Japan a full democracy is a stretch. They’ve been ruled by one party for over half a century, and definitely not b/c they’re good at their jobs.
Sorry I didn’t make any claims as to what constitutes a “full” democracy, I was going with these guys who put it at about 167 “democracies”.
IRV is just FPTP+. Like you say, it isn’t an electoral system so much as a ballot system.
We studied it, in Canada, under the name “Alternative Vote”. It was the only one we could find that was worse than FPTP:
https://www.ourcommons.ca/content/Committee/421/ERRE/Reports/RP8655791/errerp03/06-RPT-Chap4-e_files/image002.gif
There’s a reason why politicians keep suggesting it, and it’s not for our benefit.
I’d settle for what defines “democracy” at all. I’ve seen folks claim El Salvador is a democracy while Nicaragua isn’t, entirely because the government of El Salvador is politically aligned with the US and the Nicaraguans are not.
I don’t really care what flavor of election system you think is the right one. However you square it, you can have shit candidates win popular mandates. There is no system that’ll keep people you don’t like out of office, shy of a dictatorship that puts you in charge.
Suggesting it? Thirteen states have now banned ranked-choice voting as municipalities decide on whether to adopt it
I met an Aussie in Thailand who claimed that ranked ballot elections are undemocratic, that recent Australian protests were not racist, that immigration was a huge problem in Australia, that Australians are not actually racist at all, and that recent Australian protests were about protesting Palestine, and not racist at all.
You’re against logic and reason?
I’m not interested in a system that will keep people I don’t like out of office. I’m interested in a system that represents the will of the people, rather than the will of a select rich and powerful few.
If you’re willing to care, you might find one.
I don’t see the problem here, like I said, it’s worse than FPTP.
Always has been. See 1984, V for Vendetta, etc.
You… you know those are fiction, r-right?
You know all fiction is based in reality, right? Authors write what they know.
Please shoot me.
Sorry, in UK you get stabbed only.
Yeah we are America lite and it’s harder to get guns.
And how else would you describe mass imprisonment of pro-palestinian protesters? Furthermore: how is this fascist apologia not banned on .world?
Too busy complaining about getting banned from .ml
Man, MAGA sure hates free speech.
Zionist scum
Fascist.
It’s really not.
https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-kingdom/freedom-world/2025
Oh, sorry, I didnt know the “Freedom Eagle Burger index” based off Washington DC said it’s not fascist. Well, pack up guys, nothing to see here!
They weren’t declaring all protests illegal then, were they
They aren’t now, either. 2024 was after the Police, Crime, Sentencing and Courts Act, too, which was the biggest restriction on the right to protest in a long time and would be more significant than the change being discussed.
It’s a bit worrying that people are just taking this incorrect headline from a propaganda rag at face value.
I’m sure the thousands of arrests are all made up, too, huh?
What? Are you saying that all protests have already been declared illegal? Go ahead and cite this declaration you just made up. And also explain the hundreds of thousands of protesters who have not been arrested recently on various causes, from pro-Palestine marches to anti-immigration ones.
If you haven’t gone nuts and don’t actually believe this thing that isn’t happening has already happened, then the arrests of people are irrelevant because they’re not part of proposed changes.
https://freedomhouse.org/country/united-states/freedom-world/2025
A country actively kidnapping people off the streets, removing due process and habeus corpus, deporting prisoners to random countries, building concentration camps, and deploying troops on the streets has a score of 84/100. Forgive me for not feeling particularly free with my score of 91.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_House#Criticism
Having a read of this I think it’s fair to say boiling down a nation’s “freedom” to a single number is a silly unacademic metric, before even getting into the likelihood of bias and manipulation.
If it looks like a
duckfascist, swims like aduckfascist, and quacks like aduckfascist, then it probably is aduckfascist. Regardless of what a likely bias think tank’s research may say.Wow, what a clown propaganda machine.
They need to update it apparently, because I can’t see those rights.