EPTUK Politics Mega-thread - Page 640
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KwarK
United States43232 Posts
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26036 Posts
On July 27 2025 08:51 KwarK wrote: Attempted vehicular homicide? Personally I’m against it. It wasn’t merely attempted in this case. To prison I imagine he goes, and quite rightly so. | ||
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Razyda
888 Posts
On July 27 2025 08:51 KwarK wrote: Attempted vehicular homicide? Personally I’m against it. Thats because you softhearted person, with warped view of whats important. Coincidently I also think father f.. up. “Listen,” said the count, and deep hatred mounted to his face, as the blood would to the face of any other. “If a man had by unheard–of and excruciating tortures destroyed your father, your mother, your betrothed,—a being who, when torn from you, left a desolation, a wound that never closes, in your breast,—do you think the reparation that society gives you is sufficient when it interposes the knife of the guillotine between the base of the occiput and the trapezal muscles of the murderer, and allows him who has caused us years of moral sufferings to escape with a few moments of physical pain?”" Edit: Sadly guillotine is not even the case anymore. | ||
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maybenexttime
Poland5656 Posts
On July 27 2025 07:52 Razyda wrote: https://x.com/dubslife1/status/1947993668562141361 some kid robbed of E bike at knifepoint The kids dad, in his car, afterwards" It seems like it was Manchester, contrary to the tweet. I am actually curious what are thoughts on the father action? I'd say that the police/consecutive Conservative governments share part of the responsibility. The police in the UK don't do shit about crime and people know it and are fed up with it. I lived in the UK for a few years. We had an attempted burglary once. I happened to be at home so the intruders got scared when they saw me (some opportunistic teenagers). The police came over, wrote down the report and said they'd investigate and keep us updated. In reality they quickly dropped the case and never contacted us again (we called ourselves). They didn't even bother to check the camera footage from an industrial camera overlooking the street. Here's an interview with a guy that researched the topic: | ||
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CuddlyCuteKitten
Sweden2652 Posts
On July 27 2025 08:51 KwarK wrote: Attempted vehicular homicide? Personally I’m against it. You are not dumb enough to not understand that's not really the heart of the discussion. Of course everyone is against murder. And of course it's bad when people take the laws in their own hand. But it's a case that perfectly showcase the huge problem that happens when police are completely unable to stop crime to the degree they just stop caring. If someone threatened my kid with a knife and I knew the police wouldn't even care I probably wouldn't hit them with my car. If someone raped my kid and and I knew the police wouldn't care I probably would. And right now it's unlikely but wait untill she is in her teens and it's "word against word" and it's not so unrealistic. I've had minor crimes happen to me personally (attempted robbery and someone vandalising my car) and the police basically shrugged and wrote it off. The first one I can understand because I kinda felt bad for the guy tbh (just happy it was me and not some old lady). But the second one was a slam dunk, we knew exactly who it was and he was an idiot who really deserved to be punished and the police just went "meh". | ||
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KwarK
United States43232 Posts
Crime in the UK is frequently overstated in a US culture dominated discussion where it is discussed not for its own sake but to make a point about America. For example Americans are constantly insisting that gun control doesn’t work because of knife crime in the UK but the US has a bigger knife problem than the UK in addition to a much bigger gun problem. Obviously there is crime but the idea that it’s a complete Wild West and the police don’t help or do anything is simply false. There’s crime everywhere. There are police taking reports but doing nothing everywhere. There’s less in the UK than many of its peers. Ultimately resources are constrained and what may be a priority to you is competing with a bunch of other things that are priorities to others. Ideally the police would be staffed to deal with everything while also not creating an undue tax burden while also not taking resources from the NHS or education or defence. Everyone agrees on the ideal of low taxes and perfect government services. I think everyone also agrees that robbing someone with a deadly weapon should be a priority that clears the bar of action. With that in mind what exactly are you expecting for discussion here? We’re all agreed that we want better law enforcement and we’re all agreed murder is bad except for Razyda but anyone who has read his posts should know that agreeing with him is a sign that you’ve gone wrong somewhere. What is there to say? | ||
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Sent.
Poland9246 Posts
On July 27 2025 16:43 maybenexttime wrote: I'd say that the police/consecutive Conservative governments share part of the responsibility. The police in the UK don't do shit about crime and people know it and are fed up with it. I lived in the UK for a few years. We had an attempted burglary once. I happened to be at home so the intruders got scared when they saw me (some opportunistic teenagers). The police came over, wrote down the report and said they'd investigate and keep us updated. In reality they quickly dropped the case and never contacted us again (we called ourselves). They didn't even bother to check the camera footage from an industrial camera overlooking the street. Here's an interview with a guy that researched the topic: + Show Spoiler + https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-oXUN2INJc I base this on hearsay but I think our Polish cops also "don't do shit" and this stuff usually doesn't grow into a bigger problem in healthy societies because those criminals get caught by more specialized cops eventually. If things go wrong and crime rates grow too high it starts being a problem because people lose trust in state institutions which snowballs into even more criminal activity. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26036 Posts
On July 28 2025 03:27 CuddlyCuteKitten wrote: You are not dumb enough to not understand that's not really the heart of the discussion. Of course everyone is against murder. And of course it's bad when people take the laws in their own hand. But it's a case that perfectly showcase the huge problem that happens when police are completely unable to stop crime to the degree they just stop caring. If someone threatened my kid with a knife and I knew the police wouldn't even care I probably wouldn't hit them with my car. If someone raped my kid and and I knew the police wouldn't care I probably would. And right now it's unlikely but wait untill she is in her teens and it's "word against word" and it's not so unrealistic. I've had minor crimes happen to me personally (attempted robbery and someone vandalising my car) and the police basically shrugged and wrote it off. The first one I can understand because I kinda felt bad for the guy tbh (just happy it was me and not some old lady). But the second one was a slam dunk, we knew exactly who it was and he was an idiot who really deserved to be punished and the police just went "meh". People simultaneously want the police to be able to deal with crimes that affect them, from the serious to the very small fry, which is completely understandable. But people also don’t like the surveillance state you’d need to actually accomplish this. Incidentally I’m not saying various forces are doing an absolutely amazing job at all times, and it’s purely unreasonable expectations. I’m not sure how it is in various locales, at least in the UK, crime, and by association police failure is hugely amplified to a basically scaremongering degree by segments of the press, all the time. Which I think is at least partly to blame for a wider lack of faith in policing, although yes if someone personally has a bad experience, completely understandable why they would. Details in this specific incident are unclear, apart from a few obvious ones. Apparently another 15 year old has subsequently been arrested in regards to the initial theft. I’ve zero idea if this means that youngster and the victim of the ramming were both involved in the theft, or that the victim of the ramming wasn’t actually the ‘right’ target. Maybe the actual thief said ‘hey wanna try out my new e-bike?’ and the father killed someone in even greater error, so that would be even more sad. I only read about 4-5 different bits of reporting on this, details seem very thin on the ground, which I actually think is often a good thing. Let the relevant people investigate, don’t throw out a bunch of speculation into the public sphere. I mean it’s unclear to me based on the sources I’ve looked at if the bloke even tried ringing the police. I think his choice of action utterly reprehensible regardless, I can at least see a ‘guy’s kid gets robbed at knifepoint, police say they’re not going to do anything and he snaps’ as slightly more understandable than ‘the Daily Mail told me this country is ruled by criminals, better go kill a 15 year old with my car’ | ||
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Silvanel
Poland4733 Posts
On July 28 2025 04:41 Sent. wrote: I base this on hearsay but I think our Polish cops also "don't do shit" and this stuff usually doesn't grow into a bigger problem in healthy societies because those criminals get caught by more specialized cops eventually. If things go wrong and crime rates grow too high it starts being a problem because people lose trust in state institutions which snowballs into even more criminal activity. In 2024 in 78,7% of burglars were caught in Poland (according to AI, I wont be bothered to parse the records myself). You can hardly say noone here cares. Its a very serious crime afterall. Sadly it will probably be worse in 2025 from what I know. | ||
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CuddlyCuteKitten
Sweden2652 Posts
On July 28 2025 03:58 KwarK wrote: Your daughter needs a dad around. You’re not helping anyone by murder in broad daylight. If you’re going to go vigilante then be smarter about it. Crime in the UK is frequently overstated in a US culture dominated discussion where it is discussed not for its own sake but to make a point about America. For example Americans are constantly insisting that gun control doesn’t work because of knife crime in the UK but the US has a bigger knife problem than the UK in addition to a much bigger gun problem. Obviously there is crime but the idea that it’s a complete Wild West and the police don’t help or do anything is simply false. There’s crime everywhere. There are police taking reports but doing nothing everywhere. There’s less in the UK than many of its peers. Ultimately resources are constrained and what may be a priority to you is competing with a bunch of other things that are priorities to others. Ideally the police would be staffed to deal with everything while also not creating an undue tax burden while also not taking resources from the NHS or education or defence. Everyone agrees on the ideal of low taxes and perfect government services. I think everyone also agrees that robbing someone with a deadly weapon should be a priority that clears the bar of action. With that in mind what exactly are you expecting for discussion here? We’re all agreed that we want better law enforcement and we’re all agreed murder is bad except for Razyda but anyone who has read his posts should know that agreeing with him is a sign that you’ve gone wrong somewhere. What is there to say? I think the problem of people starting to take the law into their own hands because they feel the government will not is a warning sign that transcends numbers. It's easy to say "this is obviously bad" and that it's a question about priorities and numbers. But governments have a social contract with their citizens. I do my job and I pay my taxes, you take care of the things you promised to take care about. As a citizen I care about things I hear about in the news (serious crimes for example) and things that happen to me. Logically I think I care most about the big picture stuff but emotionally things that happen to me, or close to me resonates more. When the government's resources start running out in a sector they start to triage things. Focussing on more serious crimes, more acute healthcare cases, bureaucratic processes starts piling up. It's easy to do, I've been forced to do it myself. And for the individual maybe it doesn't matter that much that the police won't investigate your bike (or anyones bike) being stolen, or that you have to wait weeks for the doctor to treat your boils/persistent cold/rashes or that your application for an house extension takes weeks or even months. But at a certain point people get into the mindset that it's not even worth trying to get help for certain things. This breaks the social contract. If the government can't help me with X, why pay taxes? So they vote for lower taxes, which cuts funding, which makes the government triage even harder. Ideally the government should just cut certain services completely instead. It's better to let people sort it out with their own money (and have a system for that) than to spread the butter to thin so to speak. In some cases (like extremely expensive biological drugs that are x% better than the previous generations) you can maintain service at a lower level. But often there is a lower limit when the system doesn't really work anymore, like for police that more or less stop investigating certain crimes. Admitting that the government can't sustain certain services is toxic to the left and for the right this is the absolute best way to dismantle the welfare state. Police is special because while in other fields you can discontinue services police is something the government has a monopoly in and it carries extra weight. Sustained failure over time is very damaging to the social contract. It's like the canary in the coalmine. For good government corruption is the number one threat (because it hurts every part of government and the trust in it at the same time). But weakening of the social contract to citizens in any sector is probably number two and it doesn't really show in the numbers. Once people just give up on using a service or reporting a crime because they feel that the system doesn't work anymore it hurts (for a better way of phrasing it) the country's "soul". I have relatives in the UK and I read quite a lot of their news and in my uneducated opinion this is something they seem to have a fairly large problem with. That's why I don't think it's right to just discard this with "of course vehicular manslaughter is bad". If people start taking justice into their own hands (specifically because they feel the police won't even bother to deal with it, it's another issue if someone just have anger issues and no impulse control) it's a clear sign that things are headed in a really bad direction and I think it warrants a discussion of the underlying issue. | ||
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Uldridge
Belgium4957 Posts
However, that doesn't matter. People feeling as if they're not being helped out enough, or feeling unsafe is a much bigger indicator than whatever truth might actually be. There's too many feedback loops enforcing certain feelings and this is what ultimately dictates which person springs into action to do whatever vigilante shit they think is necessary at a particular point in time. You don't stop and think about all the stats when you become one of them and conclude "well actually it's not that bad after all", you're an instance that has a threshold met whether or not you've been inundated with the feeling of being maltreated. We do a bad job at reducing entire lives into singular off hand comments because we think we know better. But we don't and we never will. Doesn't mean people don't make stupid/uninformed decisions (I do it all the time), but it means that the feeling in the moment and all the moment that led up to it play a role. Edit: there's a whole can of worms about services and the social contract we could get into but I won't at this moment. I'm not well practised enough into what can and can't work or how it's actually all set up and interwoven, so I'd be speaking purely from an ideological framework. We can certainly dive into it if you want, won't just know when I'll have time/energy to respond. | ||
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CuddlyCuteKitten
Sweden2652 Posts
On July 28 2025 21:51 Uldridge wrote: Unless you can make a substantiated claim with evidence backing it up instead of: I read a lot of UK news, it doesn't really matter what you feel. It's probably wrong. However, that doesn't matter. People feeling as if they're not being helped out enough, or feeling unsafe is a much bigger indicator than whatever truth might actually be. There's too many feedback loops enforcing certain feelings and this is what ultimately dictates which person springs into action to do whatever vigilante shit they think is necessary at a particular point in time. You don't stop and think about all the stats when you become one of them and conclude "well actually it's not that bad after all", you're an instance that has a threshold met whether or not you've been inundated with the feeling of being maltreated. We do a bad job at reducing entire lives into singular off hand comments because we think we know better. But we don't and we never will. Doesn't mean people don't make stupid/uninformed decisions (I do it all the time), but it means that the feeling in the moment and all the moment that led up to it play a role. Edit: there's a whole can of worms about services and the social contract we could get into but I won't at this moment. I'm not well practised enough into what can and can't work or how it's actually all set up and interwoven, so I'd be speaking purely from an ideological framework. We can certainly dive into it if you want, won't just know when I'll have time/energy to respond. I don't even live in the UK so I don't "feel" anything on a personal level, I just observe from the outside. But from my own experience I was warned of being careful about phone snatching and no one wears expensive watches openly. So that's an obvious personal data point of low level crime affecting people's lives. I mainly read news about healthcare but are you arguing that the NHS hasn't been in focus for the last decade, and for the last election especially? The SOM-institute in Sweden has been measuring people's attitudes towards government and policy for decades. It's not the UK but attitudes towards the social contract and government should be fairly universal on most points. They accurately described people's attitudes towards immigration in Sweden 10-20 years before it had an impact in politics. Because people tend to feel things loooooooooong before they reach the point they act on it. Anyway I'm not interested in defending my opinion on TL.net by dredging up articles and studies. I'm just stating that if the UK has indeed starting to approach the point when certain people are so disillusioned with the police that they start taking justice into their own hands (which is debatable in this case, and it's not like it's a clear cut off, more like a long stretch of gray area) that's a very big problem for society and it shouldn't just be handwaved away. And from what I have seen/heard/read about the UK their citizens do not seem to be pleased about how the social contract has been holding up. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26036 Posts
If people feel they’re living in almost a post-apocalyptic hellscape, when actually it’s amongst the safest and least crime-ridden times to have ever existed, how do you swing that around? Let’s say there’s a hypothetical SC2 patch that by most reasonable metrics, is the most balanced state the game has ever been in. How do you placate the person who feels it’s the worst patch ever, and not as balanced as patches from the good old days, patches that were objectively way worse for balance? | ||
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CuddlyCuteKitten
Sweden2652 Posts
On July 29 2025 00:55 WombaT wrote: Impactful sure, but what do you do about it? If people feel they’re living in almost a post-apocalyptic hellscape, when actually it’s amongst the safest and least crime-ridden times to have ever existed, how do you swing that around? Let’s say there’s a hypothetical SC2 patch that by most reasonable metrics, is the most balanced state the game has ever been in. How do you placate the person who feels it’s the worst patch ever, and not as balanced as patches from the good old days, patches that were objectively way worse for balance? It's not really the same question (actual state of society versus the perceived state of society) but I will bite. I'm not sure you will like the answer. It's a two part solution so bear with me. I don't know if you've read "Sapiens: a brief history of mankind". Arguably one of the best pop-science books about society. It's basic tenant is that the tiers are civilisation is essentially built on social constructs made to trick us into working together. Essentially if you get more people to feel like a "group" (like saying we are a tribe, not just 10 different villages) you win because you have more men willing to die for the group. The biggest we have made it thus far is religion/nation states and ideologies and ideas like capitalism or currency (but they are a bit iffy). Related to this is that people feel safer around people who they view as their own group (regardless of if they actually are or not, it's a feeling it's not related to reality). The other aspect is that human beings like to stay informed of our society (it was crucial for our survival) and we overprioritze bad news. Like probably x10 or more. This is just how we work psychologically. We are also really bad at judging how things impact us. The brain does not handle statistics or things like relative risk. So we might read up about shootings in different cities and it makes us feel unsafe. This is really bad for us because the media wants to sell things and we click articles with "scary stuff" so we hear about every pedophile in the entire country and our brain will not accept the information that it's now half as common as 50 years ago. In the past this wasn't a problem because old media like tv, radio and the papers also had pretty limited access to information from across the world and a pretty uniform idea on what to write about. In short they gave you the news but with a pretty hefty slant towards whatever the editor wanted. At some basic level most news sources also wanted to prevent panic and often also shape the citizens. Propaganda in other words. It works well, massive control of media in rural areas with elderly population (so they don't have other sources) is a large part of both Erdogan's and Orbans success. So essentially you need to do 2 things 1) make everyone belong to the same group. 2) make people read less shit that makes them scared. The way to do this is by massive amounts of propaganda and some repression. We have tried the "multi-culti" approach before and it didn't work (we repressed people that believe "others" won't belong but we didn't really push people into something). The alternative for creating a homogenous population is unthinkable so if no one has a better idea it's back to the old concept of nation states again. Massive propaganda to promote a national identity and the feeling that everyone is "in" that group, some repression of what we don't want. That means repression of racism and intolerance but also some repression of religions and cultural ideas. Essentially you are a scotsman first, british after that, maybe a fan of your local football team after that and in fourth and fifth place you are a muslim with pakistani roots. Use propaganda to beat that into everyone (this goes for racists to obviously). Great, now you have one big happy group. The other aspect is probably some specialised form of censorship. We don't deal with media (especially not social media) particularly well. I believe laws that govern how news can be shown would help immensely. Don't censor the news themselves but have laws that state that you cannot show news about crime on the front page unless it's local. If you want news on national crime you have to click a link, if you want international crime you also have to click a link. If you can't filter this you simply can't show these kinds of reports on the front page. I think it would help a lot and as a side benefit it would really bring back local reporting. | ||
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LightSpectra
United States1879 Posts
On July 29 2025 04:57 CuddlyCuteKitten wrote: I don't know if you've read "Sapiens: a brief history of mankind". Arguably one of the best pop-science books about society. Actual historians and anthropologists tend to hate this book. E.g. https://web.archive.org/web/20200213152130/https://www.newenglishreview.org/C_R_Hallpike/A_Response_to_Yuval_Harari's_'Sapiens:_A_Brief_History_of_Humankind'/ | ||
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Razyda
888 Posts
On July 28 2025 03:58 KwarK wrote: Your daughter needs a dad around. You’re not helping anyone by murder in broad daylight. If you’re going to go vigilante then be smarter about it. Crime in the UK is frequently overstated in a US culture dominated discussion where it is discussed not for its own sake but to make a point about America. For example Americans are constantly insisting that gun control doesn’t work because of knife crime in the UK but the US has a bigger knife problem than the UK in addition to a much bigger gun problem. Obviously there is crime but the idea that it’s a complete Wild West and the police don’t help or do anything is simply false. There’s crime everywhere. There are police taking reports but doing nothing everywhere. There’s less in the UK than many of its peers. Ultimately resources are constrained and what may be a priority to you is competing with a bunch of other things that are priorities to others. Ideally the police would be staffed to deal with everything while also not creating an undue tax burden while also not taking resources from the NHS or education or defence. Everyone agrees on the ideal of low taxes and perfect government services. I think everyone also agrees that robbing someone with a deadly weapon should be a priority that clears the bar of action. With that in mind what exactly are you expecting for discussion here? We’re all agreed that we want better law enforcement and we’re all agreed murder is bad except for Razyda but anyone who has read his posts should know that agreeing with him is a sign that you’ve gone wrong somewhere. What is there to say? Coincidently I do agree with "we’re all agreed murder is bad except for Razyda but anyone who has read his posts should know that agreeing with him is a sign that you’ve gone wrong somewhere" problem is that you misidentified whats gone wrong and it is the law enforcement in UK. Like seriously? https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13768989/child-rapist-is-spared-jail-due-to-the-prison-overcrowding-crisis-as-judge-admits-it-would-have-been-virtually-inevitable-that-you-would-have-gone-into-custody.html "Rees Newman, 33, was handed a suspended sentence for the rape of a girl under the age of 14." For comparison: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cp3nn60wyr6o 31 month jail for a tweet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grooming_gangs_scandal that issue deserve somewhat of a full read, in short however it is about as once PM said "In 2023, then Prime Minister Rishi Sunak stated that victims had been failed due to political correctness" https://www.lbc.co.uk/news/police-failed-to-solve-burglaries-england-wales-charge-rates-fell/ "Police 'failed to solve a single burglary in nearly half of all neighbourhoods’ in past three years" from 2024 meanwhile: https://freespeechunion.org/police-make-30-arrests-a-day-for-offensive-online-messages/ "Police make 30 arrests a day for offensive online messages" This is just few. Obviously people seeing this will stop giving a damn about law and take it in their own hands. I dont even see how it isnt obvious. I can also tell you: It is going to get worse. | ||
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26036 Posts
I will say that burglaries are rather difficult to solve without some kind of smoking gun, or something easily traceable. It is, however, extremely easy in most cases to arrest someone for social media activity, the receipts are right there. There seems to be this perception that the police aren’t solving burglaries because they’re too busy chasing up Tweets, but I don’t think it’s really the case. | ||
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KwarK
United States43232 Posts
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WombaT
Northern Ireland26036 Posts
On July 29 2025 08:21 KwarK wrote: Razyda you’re not ever going to recover from “Britain is so weird, they have a whole day celebrating Guy Fawkes even though he tried to blow up parliament” in my eyes so I wouldn’t bother trying. People are allowed to be wrong on occasion to be fair | ||
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KwarK
United States43232 Posts
On July 29 2025 08:52 WombaT wrote: People are allowed to be wrong on occasion to be fair On occasion, but that’s really not the scenario we’re seeing play out here. That proclamation was very much on brand for him. | ||
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