One notable exception to this was Jeremiah Dixon, of the Mason-Dixon line. From Wikipedia:
> "Jeremiah Dixon, happening upon a slave driver mercilessly beating a poor black woman. 'Thou must not do that!' he shouted. 'You be damned! Mind your own business,' came the reply. 'If thou doesn't desist, I'll thrash thee!'
> Tall and powerful, Jeremiah seized the slave-driver's whip and gave him a soun thrashing. When he returned to Cockfield, the whip came too, and was one of the Quaker family's treasured possessions."
"The women, aged between 18 and 38, were sitting in a circle eating hummus and bread sticks on Thursday evening as part of a “welcome meeting” for Youth Demand, which calls itself a non-violent protest group."
Europeans like to look down on the rise of fascism in the US but even a superficial analysis shows that the US is simply Europe in 5-10 years.
For the UK in particular, people may point to how Labor swept the elections last year but they'd be wrong to say that there was left-wing momentum in the UK or even that it was another example of people voting against incumbent governments. Neither is true.
All that happened in the UK is the right-wing vote got split between the Conservatives and the even more right-wing Reform party. That's it. Come next election, that won't be the case. At the current rate, Conservative/Reform will merge or ally and sweep in a landslide. Starmer actually got fewer votes than Corbyn did in his previous two elections by a substantial margin.
The UK Labor party is playing the same role as the US Democratic Party. That is, they make occasional meek noises about institutional norms but they really don't oppose fascism at all. In fact, both parties are way more concerned with the rise of leftism than they are with fascism.
We've seen this exact same scenario play out in France. You have grooming victim [1] Macron who has tried to occupy some mythical "center" with Le Pen's National Front, the brainchild of leaders of Vichy France, playing the role of fascist party. But in France there's actually some leftist opposition. And what does Macron do? Routinely side with the fascists to keep the leftists out of power.
In the US, the role of Gestapo is being played by ICE. They take their marching orders from the Canary Mission to black-bag people who simply opposed Israel's genocide. This is quite literally picking up political dissidents and putting them into concentration camps.
The UK, France and Germany are well on their way to the same fate.
I really dislike this idea that social media is somehow to blame. It's too superficial.
Right-wing hate speech dominates social media because it's the normative position of our society. All of that existed long before social media. The only reason people think otherwise is probably because they were too young to observe it.
Segregation only officially ended ~60 years ago. Even after that we have had, and even continue to have, economic segregation.
Slavery might've been officially abolished ~160 years ago but it exists to this day in the form of convict leasing.
Queer people were criminalized and persecuted up until the late 20th century.
Women only really gained bodily autonomy in the 1960s and 1970s (and lost some of it in 2022).
Social media simply reflects how popular all of these ideas still are.
> Even after that we have had, and even continue to have, economic segregation.
A lot of real-world economic segregation is directly linked the housing market, and then the leftists actively support it. When policy choices are adopted such that the market threatens to reduce the amount of segregation that a city or neighborhood is subjected to, leftists call that development "gentrification" and scream in protest against it.
Gentrification doesn't reduce segregation, it just moves the boundaries of the segregated areas.
Poor people mostly rent because they can't afford or can't get a mortgage. When an area gentrifies those people are forced out because the rents rise, and wealthy people move in. If you just look at the income distribution in the area it looks like "the population" became wealthier, but if you look at the individuals you find that the old residents have been forced out, and generally wind up poorer because of this (social networks disrupted, work further away etc).
> A lot of real-world economic segregation is directly linked the housing market
Yes.
> ... and then the leftists actively support i
No, they don't.
Liberals (which really means neoliberals) support it. Here's a helpful diagram:
<--------- Left ------ Center ------- Right ------------->
+-------------------------+------------------------------+
} Cares about People | Cares about Property |
+-------------------------+------------------------------+
| Leftists/Progressives | (Neo)liberals |
+-------------------------+------------------------------+
| Socialism | Capitalism |
+-------------------------+--------------+---------------+
| Materialism | Idealism |
+-------------------------+--------------+---------------+
| | Democrats | Republicans |
+-------------------------+--------------+---------------+
Actual leftists want everyone to have access to affordable housing and realize that landlords are anathema to that. Leftists believe in "social housing", which is the government providing a significant portion of housing stock to guarantee shelter.
Leftists also generally believe in "personal property" not "private property". That is, you can own your own home but you can't hoard housing.
How successful NIMBYism is in the US just shows you how normative right-wing attitudes are. done
With social media you don't even need to bribe. As long as your content is engaging enough and drives ad impressions, the social platform will promote it for free.
This Left vs Right - us vs them - does not serve us well.
It seems to me that what the world needs is a mix of conservative and progressive ideas. Instead of calling each other names or label each other, we could also work together.
In the end we all have a the same goal: Preventing harm. We just happen to have different ideas about how to go about it.
This kind of bothsidesing is either hopelessly naive, intellectually lazy or a deliberate attempt to minimize right-wing violence by falsely claiming the "left" is just as bad.
What conservative ideas do we "need" exactly?
there is no compromising with fascism. We are quite literally black-bagging people and unlawfully deporting them and/or putting them in camps, some in our country, some in third-party nations like El Salvador. What's the compromise here? Only black-bag half as many people?
Also, in the US in particular, there is functionally no "left". Everyone is a neoliberal and we have two parties: the center-right Democrats and the far-right Republicans who both defend American imperialism and domestic and foreign capitalist exploitation, who only differ on inconsequential "social" issues.
> In the end we all have a the same goal
No, we don't. The goal of our political establishment is to further concentrate wealth in the hands of the already ultra-wealthy and further impoverish the working class.
You still enjoy a lot of benefits that the left fought for and the right bitterly opposed: weekends, a 40 hour working week, vacations, job safety, Social Security, Medicare and so on. The right wants to literally do away with all of those things.
The core organizing principle of the American right is cruelty. It's exacting revenge on their perceived enemies, be they immigrants, trans people, queer people, women or black and brown people.
You define conservative ideas as fascism in one swoop and now "they" are all evil, all discussion stops, and you fall in exactly the trap you accuse the other "side" of. We do not need sides. There is no "The Right" as much as there is no "The Left".
Of course we need to not allow fascism (and the populist MAGA nonsense), I have stated nothing to contrary.
For the record I tend to be strongly liberal progressive (see my various comments, although I keep politics on HN to a minimum).
But I also realize that only liberal progressive ideas are not enough, just handouts do not work, people want jobs through which they can support themselves, we need a working economy, reduce debt, etc, etc.
So, again, I wish we would come together instead of drifting more and more into extremes. If we did come together, we would not have a problem with fascism in the first place. We would not be so easily divide by populists smoke bombs like trans-athletes or alleged violent immigrants.
This is not "hopelessly naive" but intensely practical and necessary.
Do you not consider people who voted for a proto-fascist president, if not evil, at least responsible for his wrongdoings? Do you really think we can take the middle road here? Like the two-state solution with Israel?
I don't.
This is the paradox of tolerance. The fascists will eat everyone alive if they are allowed to freely express their "opinions" and implement them on a societal scale.
Not sure how else I can phrase it... We have to stay away from false equivalencies.
I am not, and was not, saying that we should tolerate fascism! We should not, absolutely not, and what is happening in this country right now is a travesty.
I'll try to make it simple: Fascism = very bad, voting for a fascist = very bad, only conservative ideas = not good enough, only progressive ideas = not good enough.
Moderate conservatives and liberals not coming together is what causes fascism in the first place.
I wonder what the root causes are. Lack of civil education, community strength, and things like these probably play a big part in that division. Educated, clever, happy, balanced people would not let someone like Trump (grab em by the pussy, etc) come even an inch to the any governing body.
Late reply... I think lack of education is part of it. The other part is that we are bombarded with content designed to keep us glued to the screen, and the best to do that is to feed us stuff we either agree with or that causes us to feel self-righteous indignation :)
Centrism has always meant too stupid or milquetoast to stake out a proper position.
Damned few on the left want to arrest people for giving offense whereas the overwhelming majority on the right support an actual fascist regime on this side of the pond.
> Centrism has always meant too stupid or milquetoast to stake out a proper position.
Even when people hold views different to mine, I am careful not to ascribe this to some fundamental flaw in their character. There are lots of ways to be wrong about something that are incidental and understandable, and these apply to me as well as others.
I don't think this practice (c.f. "fundamental attribution error") is a route to truth or productive discourse.
Most issues are multidimensional but lets simplify. The most extreme pro gun rights position would see militias with machine guns, felons with guns, teachers and a small army of security guards packing heat to fight school shooters.
The most extreme anti gun rights position would see few private citizens without a specific need armed.
A centrist position has typically been to do almost nothing to allow some states to do minor reforms so long as gun rights aren't impacted.
The fact that the developed world virtually all exists towards very highly centrally regulated to nonexistant gun ownership and isn't constantly burying children suggests that this is the right strategy and that deviation is defect worse many strategies for handling many issues require commitment and half measures do nothing.
Take a wife beater who hasn't caught a felony yet but whose history of violent behavior ought to disqualify him. Banning his gun ownership due to misdemeanor and denying him or seizing his registered guns might statistically save his wife but a waiting period for a new handgun won't.
> Damned few on the left want to arrest people for giving offense
Of course they do. Plenty of people on the left say that the very notion of free speech is "problematic" and must be criticized. Which directly implies that they find it less problematic to criminalize speech, as the UK does.
Karl Popper pointed out that the free speech must defend itself. Otherwise a party that wants to put an end to it will use it for own propaganda and eventually get into power destroying free speech.
Of cause it is hard to get the balance right and what UK is doing does not look right. But UK does have the problem of ultra-right movements that want to establish a fascist regime.
> Karl Popper pointed out that the free speech must defend itself.
Yes, that's in fact a very old idea - that the "soap box" must defend itself with the "ballot box", and the ballot box with the "cartridge box". But what's happening now is a lot worse: free speech is being destroyed for the sake of not "causing offense". Which amounts to giving express legitimacy to intolerance, and saying that it must always win over tolerance.
If I read this correctly (my Swiss German is a bit rusty), there is an unnamed group (presumably somewhere on the left) who called for causing disturbances during a concert of a singer, and the organizers decided to cancel the concert?
Is that correct?
Because if I recall your (now flagged) message correctly, you were claiming that the left was in favor of putting people in jail for their opinions. While "we're going to make a demonstration to show how much we disagree with someone" can definitely be an annoyance, it's really, really, really far from your initial claim.
The flip side to that is that very few people, if any, on the left are actually calling for meaningful protections for free speech. They see nothing wrong when someone is put in jail for "causing gross offense" on Twitter, as happens often enough in the UK. As for the rest of Europe, just look at the knee-jerk hysterical, pearl-clutching response to Vice President JD Vance's recent speech about the EU and its values, and how much of that response was coming from the left.
Or they just take the more nuanced JS Mill view that free speech is about truth and not simply about being able to say whatever you want without any consequences. Being offensive for the sake of being offensive has nothing to do with finding truth, so isn't perceived as a question of free speech.
Truth is not considered a defense to the crime of "causing offense" in the UK. Besides, the official standard of what's considered to be "truth" as opposed to "misinformation" is often skewed in ways that are entirely self-serving.
Of course, because we also consider intent, so the law distinguishes saying something true that someone happens to find offensive (which carries EHRC Article 10 protections), as opposed to saying something to cause offence that also happens to be true (which does not). If you're worried about a compromised judiciary one day interpreting such a distinction unfavourably then it's pointless because by that point they can interpret any law in a way that silences critics of the regime. Navalny was officially in jail for embezzlement but no-one's suggesting we shouldn't have embezzlement laws on free speech grounds.
> The flip side to that is that very few people, if any, on the left are actually calling for meaningful protections for free speech
This isn't true. Democrats were heavily pushing the PRESS act for example, which would expand speech protections for journalist and reporters. This was tanked by Republicans.
> They see nothing wrong when someone is put in jail for "causing gross offense" on Twitter
You keep repeating this but not providing any sort of evidence to it. Again, you seem to be talking about the boogeyman that Republican talking heads have created instead of pointing at any actual policy. I would advise you go outside and talk to actual people.
> As for the rest of Europe, just look at the knee-jerk hysterical, pearl-clutching response to Vice President JD Vance's recent speech about the EU and its values, and how much of that response was coming from the left.
Most Republicans talking about free-speech are hypocrites and liars including the President, Vice President, and their first buddy. I imagine that has more to do with the reaction than anything else. They don't walk the walk but love to talk the talk.
This is the Paradox of Tolerance. If you tolerate intolerance then intolerance wins, and you don't have tolerance any more.
Intolerance isn't just "causing offence", it is the creation of an environment which is threatening. If ou get enough veiled anonymous threats against your life, health and family then you might well withdraw from public life. And then, what value does "free speech" have for you?
But, you say, you aren't talking about threats, just about "offence". But offensive speech begets threats. If Mr Rabblerouse publicly calls Jenny Good out as a dangerous degenerate, some of his followers will, quite predictably, follow his lead and start to make actual threats. Some might go further and carry out those threats. Even if they do not, Ms Good is going to have a perfectly reasonable fear that they might.
You say that Mr Rabblerouse is merely stating a legitmate opinion, that he has a right to be offensive, and that the Ms Good is equally free to say unpleasant things about him. But that is just deliberately ignoring the power inequality. Ms Good has no mob who will take the hint to hate on Mr Rabblerouse, no power to put him in fear. But he does have the power to do it to her, on a whim, answerable to nobody. And when people see that, and see how easily he can put Ms Good in fear and misery, they will think twice about their own speech.
And this is the point. Hate speech is not merely unpleasant and worthless, it actively suppresses the speech of other people. US jurisprudence makes much of "chilling effects" of government action on speech, and with good reason. But it is not just the government that can chill speech. Mr Rabblerouse can chill the speech of others against himself very effectively. So the only way to ensure freedom of speech, paradoxically, is to ban speech that incites hatred.
I've heard many conservatives claim that, but I've never seen a progressive actually asking for people to be put in jail for opinions.
Are there sociopaths on all sides? For sure. But right now, I see plenty of sociopaths in power instrumentalizing conservatism to tear apart at our democracies, while screaming and yelling that the left is out there to get conservatives – and plenty of conservatives believing them.
So... no, I don't buy this "no better", not in 2025.
More than 20 uniformed police, some equipped with Tasers,
forced their way into the Westminster meeting house [of worship]
and arrested six people at the meeting
on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance.
[police] arrested five other people for the same offence on Friday
Based on the given charge, Police had a feeling that some Quakers might be talking about being a public nuisance.
If we assume the best of the Met police, they first considered sending an officer over to talk to the Quakers and maybe offer some counsel.
And being the Met police and being faced with the potential of a non-violent resolution to a non-violent issue, the police instead opted for an approach that mirrors violent police raids.
That's if we assume the best of the Met police. They might not have ever considered a non-violent solution for Quakers.
It certainly doesn't compare to the scale of Kristallnacht (hence "writ small"). And Kristallnacht was just government-sponsored vandalism whereas in this case people were also arrested, so in that respect this was actually worse. But all that is neither here nor there. Kristallnacht was a harbinger of much worse to come, and that was what I intended to convey: I was making a prediction that this is a harbinger of much worse to come.
I think yd have been better off going with harbinger and no analogy here. This was a government agency acting on behalf of the government in a targeted arrest, not the government saying to citizens it's a free-for-all on targeting an entire group's businesses and homes (which is why "writ small" still fails here).
There's real levels of Naziesque behavior happening in the US and UK right now, but it's also not exactly the same and bad comparisons make it easier for many people to dismiss genuine concerns as hyperbolic (especially when one is in a targeted group, which i am, and trying to point out how bad things are getting).
I mean, worth pointing out this group is pretty explicitly focused on conducting unlawful civil disobedience, and plenty of the members have previous convictions for doing just that. This is hardly the police just rounding up your local reading group.
Like the (as far has i know) 4 People who have been charged with the same crime: shooting an guy down in florida. And i mean the same crime was on HN here a few months ago.
Since everyone always feels that they are within their rights and reasonable, and that the problem is the wrongness and unreasonableness of others, this principle doesn't help very much. In fact, it's actually a recipe for the container destroying itself.
I wonder if those people would also argue it doesn't violate the "be kind" rule. Maybe adding empathy to that list could help. I think the ability to look at things from other people's perspectives and ascribe to the idea that one may very well be wrong... shows a lot more intelligence than the alternative.
So basically the "middle ground fallacy" distilled to its purest form as the overarching moderation guidelines for this website? I have been a hackernews reader for almost 15 years and I remember when this very much was not the case. The main goal was TRUTH and CURIOSITY.
now the main goal seems to be coddling the most inane and lukewarm minds imaginable. More concerned "politeness" and "civility"
They argue that 1+1=5 while I say no FUCK OFF 1+1=2 then the moderator says now now let's be civil here and meet in the middle at 1+1=3 ....no ..fuck off... 1+1=2
And when it comes to REAL engineering or geopolitics or medicine or government policy with people's lives on the line ...the TRUTH matters more than being polite.
That's not close to accurate. It was never ok for HN users to tell each other to fuck off, and the purpose of the site is just the same as it always was. As for truth: people telling each other to fuck off does nothing in service of truth. I recommend this old pg quote to you:
Comments should be written in the spirit of colleagues cooperating in good faith to figure out the truth about something, not politicians trying to ridicule and misrepresent the other side.
Telling someone advocating for the warrant-less probable cause-less kidnapping of dissidents by authorities to fuck off does nothing to discredit their position. It does discredit this sites reputation for you to claim otherwise in your role as moderator though.
Ultimately I was referring to your comment, in the context of criticizing the comment criticizing the comment responding to your comment. Some nuance and charity that I would normally apply if responding directly to your comment naturally got lost with the indirection.
To respond more directly to it, "reasonable suspicion" is a term of art in the law, and it's a term that explicitly refers to a lower standard of proof than probable cause, which is the term of art describing the standard of proof required to enter a house and arrest someone like this. It's not the case that police routinely arrest people on just this lower standard of proof (they're prohibited from doing so).
Interpreted charitably your comment was merely using the term in a non-artful way, to refer to the different higher standard of probable cause. However given the context of the thread, article, and the current US government's recent actions, I don't think the comment dang responded to interpreted your comment that way - rather I think they interpreted it as you advocating for the government arresting people under this (unlawful, lower) standard.
I don't think the comment Dang responded to strongly rebuking your comment under this interpretation weakened their argument - it's an interpretation that is out of line enough that a strong rebuke is the effective response. Hence why I objected to that part of Dang's reasoning in telling them off.
It seems to me that what you're responding to here is the injustice and outrage of police raiding a Quaker meeting. That's fine, but it's not a response to the argument I was making. (Which I can understand, in a way, because I didn't spell it out—I only linked to it.)
You're saying the prior arrests failed to be a deterent, so presumably these arrests won't work either.
Given that the goal of the group is to draw attention to their causes, and police action caused them to recieve a huge amount of attention, the whole thing seems rather self defeating.
The Quakers are fairly heavy politically invested, and most of them aren't even theists any more. There's no right of sanctuary in the UK, and if a group is sheltering criminals or providing them with premeses to plan criminal actions, it's damned right they should have their door busted in.
I'm suggesting that the organisation is not the one that existed 100 years ago, even by a very large stretch of the imagination. The title is emotive largely because of the reputation of the organisation.
If the headline was "police raid house to arrest criminal activists", it wouldn't have made a blip.
It's just indicative of a wider trend in some western countries to punish and threaten people protesting their complicity in genocide.
Same thing or perhaps worse is happening in Germany, US, etc.
One can just as well ask why would a democratic country arrest and threaten young people for protesting actions of a foreign country, when such actions include things like mass killings of children, or targeted attacks on healthcare and rescue workers, where said country sometimes just murders 15 of them while on a rescue mission (destroying 5 ambulances and a fire engine, basically killing all of the teams), like recently.
It's a worthy question that such an article can elicit regardless of who's being arrested for activism.
If you give police the right to invade and arrest any group that is "sheltering criminals", and you define "crime" broadly enough to include "suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance" i.e. encouraging protest, then you have given up on living in a free society.
> A Met spokesman said six women had been arrested on suspicion of conspiracy to cause a public nuisance, amid fears of a sit-down protest in the capital. None have been charged.
