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> 99.9% of the time I see this claim, it's right-wing Americans or bots trying to make the UK look like a hell-hole.

Given you got the nationality wrong 2/3 times in this comment section and they weren't bot accounts either, you might want to adjust that number.

You got the political lean wrong at least once as well. This might be the time to adjust your worldview. Empirically it doesn't seem to mesh with reality.


I don't know about that case, but the bar is as low as it can be anyways. Hapless UK police are willing to play attack dog for nearly anyone.

Someone got arrested and intimidated by police because they criticized someone with even only a modicom of authority: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/mar/29/parents-arre...

Imagine getting six police officers sent to your house and spending 11 hours at a police station for causing "disharmony" by disagreeing with how your daughter's school operates in a WhatsApp group. In a sensible country that might've been a phone call or a single officer stopping to chat and defusing the situation if police decided to get involved at all.


Your country doesn't make mistakes involving police? Really?

Wasn't there a story about a woman getting put in jail for having spaghetti on a spoon that they thought was drugs? Lost her job?

https://www.syracuse.com/news/2014/09/florida_woman_jailed_s...

Yeah, imagine that. Getting put in jail for a month.


Do you think this is some "my country vs your country" competition? It's not. I wasn't trying to wound any national pride either.

Also I'm not from Florida or the US for that matter.


This was, obviously, stupid and wrong, but:

* The Police admitted their obvious error and paid £20k in damages: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4gz1qy30v5o

* This bizarre case has nothing to do with "speech that offends the prevailing political orthodoxy" (root comment).

If you look for examples of the police arresting people for stupid and unjustifiable reasons, you can find them in lots of countries, including the US. For example, here is someone being arrested in Kansas for clapping too loudly during a meeting: https://www.kbtx.com/2026/07/27/teacher-arrested-repeatedly-... It's absolutely right that this sort of thing is reported and it's right for people to be outraged about it. However, I'd be cautious about drawing overly sweeping conclusions about the UK from such cases.


Yeah, but in the UK it's systemic and on a national scale.It would be less obnoxious if they were really good at fighting regular crime, but they are atrocious at that.

So yes, we might not be so dreadful compared to Hicksville, US or some craphole country like India,but that's a very low bar for the police of a G5 nation.

Absolutely go ahead and make sweeping generalisations about the state of the police in the UK. It's all true (except if anyone claims they are systemically racist, or some other clickbaity nonsense).


What exactly are you saying is systemic and on a national scale? I certainly don't think the specific news story we're talking about is typical. That's why it was widely reported and why the Police had to admit their error.

Basically every week there's another story that makes it onto the news about yet another outrageous apprehension. 60,000 arrests or so over the last couple of years IIRC. What's disgraceful is that for years the police whined that they didn't have enough resources because of Tory budget cuts, something which I can personally attest, and then you get this...

100% of the time I would pick the UK police system over the US's.

Would you?

In the UK, they can't force you to speak, but not answering questions can be interpreted as evasion / "adverse interference".

They do not need a warrant to search your phone. Not providing them with a PIN can be a separate charge, with up to 2 years imprisonment.

They can hold you up to 36 hrs if the police decide so. Up to 14 days without charge under modern broad "anti terrorism" laws.


You're talking about UK laws rather than UK police.

Cool, now compare how many people die to police violence in the UK vs the US.

Also note the absence of large scale destructive anti-police riots in the UK over the past decade.


There are fewer anti police riots in UK, because UK is much more effective at catching and prosecuting rioters than US. In US, rioters enjoy extreme leniency. Only a tiny fraction of 2020 rioters have faced any justice at all.

As for police killings, you are comparing an event that’s extremely unlikely to happen with an event that’s multiple orders of magnitude more likely. Speech offense prosecutions in UK are more common today than political prosecutions were in post Kruschev Soviet Union. The only reason UK has fewer political prisoners than Soviet Union had is that the sentences are shorter and typically non-custodial.


I could find one news story a week about an outrageous arrest in the US, or in many other countries. You don't give a citation for the 60k figure, but I imagine it's the same one that has to be laboriously debunked every time someone brings social media talking points about the UK to one of these threads: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49830776

There might be more value in having LLMs systematically hunt for mistakes in existing and widely assumed correct math papers, or hunt for counter-examples to things thought proven. There's likely to be a couple mistakes hiding in the less well scrutinized corners of mathematics.

Maybe something interesting will fall over because of that, who knows?


Well, but I'm only going back to Oct 8th! Gotcha!

"Who started it" is a stupid and pointless question to begin with, but now we're reaching new heights.

If both sides are comitting warcrimes, both sides must be condemned and sanctioned. It's not about who is committing warcrimes harder or who was first.


This is correct approach, both sides are beyond abhorable in their own special ways and any decent human being with understanding of current situation and historical path leading to it has no reason to support either.

One side shouting the other is worse because XYZ is childish, not factual.

Abhorable, both, thats it.


Anyone with a decent historical understanding would support Hamas, just like people who know history support the Haitian slave rebellion. People have a right to resist occupation and genocide.

What a strange world we live in. I never expected to see someone on HN openly supporting the murder of civilian men, women and children for the crime of living in a country that is at war with the perpetrators. That's a psychopaths twisted understanding of "eye for an eye" justice.

Thank god most of the world has since risen above that.


This isn't taking my argument in good faith. Occupation resistance is none of the things you've stated and the reality of Zionism doesn't match your description, even remotely. If people break into your house, murder your family, then move in. You have every right to fight back. This is a historical standard well accepted by international groups. The Haitian Slave revolt, Pueblo revolt and Warsaw rebellion are all other analogous examples.

Fighting back is legitimate. Doing so by essentially any means is not. The murder of civilians is where any side loses my support.

They're not "civilians" if they're living on stolen land. Again, this is a very well accepted standard.

We all live on land that at some point someone else considered their own.

Also I can tell just and unjust apart on my own, and I do not need some "international group" or "historical standard" to stand in for my frontal lobe and morals. Thank you very much.


We do live on stolen land, and when the indigenous fought back and killed people living on that land it was valid resistance:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pueblo_Revolt

> I do not need some "international group" or "historical standard" to replace my frontal lobe and cognitive empathy. Thank you very much.

While understandable, this is a privileged take from someone who didn't have their family murdered by occupiers.


History is barbaric and abhorrent. I'd rather we aim higher than use it to justify modern-day cruelty.

But this is the point! Israel and the Zionists are reenacting the worst crime in human history (the genocide and colonization of the Americas). They are, in 2026 doing what the Spanish did in the 1600s and getting the same resulting rebellion from the occupied people.

Edit:

I'm throttled, but I'll leave you with my final thought...

I won't condemn resistance. I would never condemn people who fight occupation and genocide. I don't see us closing this gap, but I hope you can try to imagine what it was like if you were a slave, an indigenous American or a Palestinian. If you were really in their situation, what would you do? It's also worth mentioning that the Palestinians have tried peaceful resistance and the Israelis sniped thousands of them, including children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2018%E2%80%932019_Gaza_border_...

> The same is true for the other side.

More than 64,000 children have been killed in Gaza and only 19% of Israelis think the IDF have gone too far and 34% think they haven't gone far enough:

https://www.unicefusa.org/stories/more-50000-children-killed...

https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2024/05/30/israeli-views-...


> But this is the point! Israel and the Zionists are reenacting the worst crime in human history (the genocide and colonization of the Americas). They are, in 2026 doing what the Spanish did in the 1600s and getting the same resulting rebellion from the occupied people.

Yes, but I will still condemn both sides, even if one is merely responding in kind. If it was in my power, I'd lock them all up. Hamas' and Israel's leadership, as well as anyone who directly comitted those acts.

Then I'd replace Israel/Palestine with something democratic similar to Lebanon's solution of accomodating multiple major religions.

> If you were really in their situation, what would you do?

I am perfectly confident that the average palestinian would not go through with killing a civilian Israeli woman or child even if you loaded and pointed the gun for them.

The same is true for the other side. The Israeli government/IDF and Hamas represent the worst of both.


The problem with your occupation argument is how selective you are about who you apply it to. Israel has 15+ neighbors whose borders have changed since post WWII. Ukraine didn't even exist. You choose to apply your occupier label to Israel, who you know the current occupants can trace ancestral homeland to for thousands of years, while letting literally everyone in the world off the hook.

I wonder where does that double standard come from? Oh if only we could identify some attribute that Israel has that the hundreds of other countries where your silly double standard does also apply do not.

No! We know exactly where your double standard comes from. It comes from your hatred of Jews. You have decided that Jews are the only people in the world that do not deserve to exist.

But they do exist. And they will continue to exist in spite of small-minded hateful people like you!


People indigenous to the land shape the land. Colonizers invade. Ashkenazis ethnically cleansed almost all of Palestine and now they're trying to finish the job via genocide. This is very straight forward and very well documented.

Looking at your comment history, oh boy you sure are one sided. No doubt version of history in your head conveniently justifies it, its just... not a complete history, is it.

This is one of the most one sided issues in modern human history. Stealing land is wrong, murdering people who live on that land is wrong. The number of people who support Zionism is rapidly dwindling and won't exist outside of Israel once the baby boomers are gone. Israel will go the way of Rhodesia within the next decade.

There was no "genocide" until Hamas poked that bear.

You could make the case for occupation, but then you would have to pack your bags and hand your house keys over to descendants of whoever lived there 80 years ago or risk being called a hypocrite.


There was no genocide nor apartheid until Europeans invaded Palestine and started ethnically cleansing, killing and raping the indigenous Palestinians.

There still isn't. Your characterization of Israelis as European is ridiculous.

I'm going back to Oct 7 for my argument. You can go back to Oct 8 for yours but you'd be arguing in bad faith.

How is it bad faith? This whole situation is a cycle of revenge going back at least to the 1920s with conflicts between Arabs and Jewish settlers in Mandatory Palestine. Israel is killing civilians, but Hamas attacked them, but the IDF was enforcing segregation, but they had to show force after the intifadas...

And you can trace that back to the Balfour declaration being unclear, and rabbis who started religious Zionism feeling entitled to the land, and antisemitic massacres in Europe that inspired Theodor Herzl to campaign for a Jewish state. Or even further back until you end up in Biblical times.

You can't just pick a start date and decide who is responsible for all this.


I wouldn't call Palestinian resistance "revenge". If someone stole your land, trying to get it back isn't really revenge imho. I think going back to the creation of Zionism is the best starting point. Ashkenazis are mostly European, so it doesn't make sense to go back to biblical times (which were mostly fictional anyway). This is a pretty textbook case of European colonization.

It's bad faith because no sane person would willfully ignore the cause of the current conflict when making an argument about who started it.

That's the right question to ask. One honest caveat: The interface seam currently forces the pin at the intermediate. Want me to implement or address the other item first?

Honest take. Implementing first would break the seams, our work here is done. This is a great place to stop.-

You are absolutely right.

It's a meta product. Safe to assume that sooner or later it will be unusable unless you install the latest update so it can continue phoning home.

A woman could be nude for all intents and purposes, but as long as her areola and crotch are still covered by some strained piece cloth that leaves little of what it is supposed to hide to the imagination, it's still a-ok. I can't tell if its an elobrate charade or if the mere thought of female anatomy actually compromised some people's intelligence to such a degree we ended up with this delicious clownshow.

The hypersensitivity to only overly specific areas of skin of some US-based services was bewildering to the average European a decade ago, but we really should be over it by now. The time for frustration and confusion is over, and it ought to be the era of open amusement.


You can trivially have storage deduplication for the files served via torrent, transparent to the protocol. The most trivial version of this that you can do today with pretty much any client is having a single directory containing files serving multiple overlapping torrents.

> files serving multiple overlapping torrents

This sounds wildly complex, especially from a discovery perspective.


I don't see why it would be. It's transparent to other clients just like it is to the protocol. It cannot be more complex than alternatives by construction.

Or use a filesystem with dedupe like ZFS.

> Threat from Russia

Right. Mighty Russia that has been fought to a standstill by its much smaller neighbour is going to provoke a military alliance absolutely dwarfing it into outright war. Not even China is going to back that after having a look at who the more valuable trading partner is.

Being ready for war is reasonable, being afraid or worried is a waste of time, and even irrational in this case.


From the article, starting in the next paragraph after the one your quote was in:

> But what is the threat? In 1940 the danger of a German invasion of the UK was very real. But the chances of Russian tanks rolling up Whitehall are surely negligible.

> "It's not the tanks you need to worry about," says historian Margaret MacMillan, author of War: How Conflict Shaped Us.

> "It's the cutting of cables on the ocean floor. It's the hacking into systems on which so many things depend. The possibility for asymmetric war, for cyber war, is growing by leaps and bounds."


Case in point, Russia has been fought to a standstill by its much smaller neighbor using asymmetric warfare. There is no reason Russia would not turn around and do the same to other countries.

One may argue it has already done so in the past via election interference, except now it also has AI in its arsenal, which won’t even need ICBMs to be delivered to its targets.


Dude, you have no idea about the modern warfare. The only country Russia is actually afraid of is the USA. And nobody except probably the USA or maybe Turkey is even remotely ready for modern war. Russia is having "military operation" right now. If they start the "war".

Second of all, the "much smaller neighbour" is any European country to them. Ukraine is the biggest country on European continent if we include the occupied territory. And it's actually has the most capable armed forces military-wise. Russia took over 116k sq km of Ukraine. All three Baltic states are 175k sq km combined and they literally can't defend themselves in case USA decides to withdraw.

And last but not the least, Russia's war is irrational. It makes no sense from any rational viewpoint. So relying on common sense in this case is wrong. You need to understand russian ideology and Putin's specifically.


Just leave it. There are so many Russian apologists on this forum it’s exhausting. You’d think the fact that Russia is in the middle of an unwise and unnecessary war of aggression wouldn’t itself be an argument for concerns of more attacks on NATO countries and allies.

But to prebut whataboutism, I also don’t like American imperialism.


> it makes no sense from any rational viewpoint

Didnt they start almost immediately trying to setup like mineral processing facillities in areas they were able to nominally gain control of?

Wonder what the impetus for this was, were the elites embezzling too much or low oil prices or something that motivated them to pillage to make up the difference? Or typical greed in the absence of any asscovery...


I’m not quite sure what the disagreement is here. I was just saying asymmetric or other unconventional warfare can be extremely effective, as Ukraine’s resilience has shown, and there’s no reason Russia could not adopt similar means. In fact it has been doing so in the past. Somehow that makes me a Russia apologist, as sibling comment implies? Genuinely confused.

It's not so much about how powerful Russia is as the attitude of it's leadership that seems determined to go attacking.

It's already gone provoking with the drones at Leipzig and the like.

And the place which is not overflowing with spare cash has been building 20,000 hosptial beds near the Baltics https://militarnyi.com/en/news/russia-plans-16-000-20-000-ho...


> 20,000 hospital beds

The trolling never stops, as if they have any intention of fixing anyone broken


Invading Ukraine was idiotic on its own, and that happened.

It's not irrational to notice that irrational actors do irrational things.


How rational is killing others when someone tell you? You need strong propaganda of fear to makes other to kill each other. Something like those articles.

Yet again: we're making the Russians do it?

Whats the point of using methods that you fight against?

"Burning spaceship falling into sun has clogged toilet"

I'm not sure that particularly matters at this point?


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