It’s actually the Atlantic Ocean arm of the Oceanic Conveyor Belt bringing to Europe warm waters from Africa.
The only relation with the Gulf Of Mexico is that the western side of that current (which goes in the opposite direction, so North -> South, along the Eastern Northern and Southern America) passes alongside it.
The hilarious bit here is that the GCHQ, which is Britain’s NSA and was shown in the Snowden Revelations to do far more extensive civil society surveillance of their own citizens than the NSA did of Americans (in Britain, unlike in the US, there are no legal limits to civil society surveillance done by the State), are the ones making these claims.
Even if if what they say is 100% perfectly and exactly true and not at all embellished by Britain’s very own civil society surveillance spooks, their hypocrisy is proper World Book Of Records level shit.
All it would take is for them to hack the GCHQ which, as the Snowden Revelations have shown, has been harvesting pretty much all private data and habits of pretty much all Britons, for over a decade.
My point is that the police definitelly “can be arsed to enforce certain laws in full” if the right people tell sufficiently highly placed people in the right police force to enforce them strictly.
This is called “selective enforcement” and is definitelly the kind of shit you see in countries were Rule Of Law is weak, like Latin American dictatorships.
The system is designed with overbroad laws with lax enforcement exactly so that even though the actual law as written is draconian, common people don’t normally get hit by it so they don’t feel it is draconian, yet at the same time when the “right” people desire it they can make enforcement go from lax to strict against specific people or groups of people who thus get hit by the draconian elements of the law.
What you wrote is a great example of how those laws are de facto fine for most people most of the time because in their own life they never see the law applied to its full extent and thus many will even form a positive opinion of those laws because as long as the enforcement of those laws is lax and doesn’t include the most draconian provisions, those laws work fine (or don’t even get used, so they’re not seen as a problem)
Meanwhile the laws can be applied in a strict way and to their full extent, so people in positions of power can arbitarilly (and I emphasise “arbitrarilly” because it’s the very opposite of how Justice should be applied) order it to be used with full force against specific targets, which is exactly what Starmer is doing now with some of the crazier anti-Terror legislation in the books.
Selective enforcement turns Law Enforcement into a weapon which can be pointed at the enemies of people with sufficient power.
Proper Justice Systems try very hard to avoid selective enforcement situations because that’s are the very antithesis of “Everybody is treated the same in the eyes of the Law” (i.e.“The Law is blind”) core principle in Justice - everybody is not treated the same in the eyes of the Law when a political figure can tell the Met Commissioner and the CPS to “throw the book at these specific demonstrators” and those demonstrators are then arrested and charged using elements of certain laws which nobody else ever has applied against them.
Maybe, I lived in the UK when that stuff was changed but it’s been a while and I’m probably a bit off on the details.
At the time there was some outrage because it suspended rights which were widely believed to be fundamental over there.
I lived for over a decade in the UK and hence am quite familiar with the British system.
However the standard I compare Britain against is The Netherlands, not the United States.
In European terms the UK is de facto more authoritarian than most, though not in a goose-stepping jackboot way but more in a “laws designed for very broad interpretation” + “they’ll throw the book at you if you’re foreigner, or critical of the system itself (for example, member of a leftwing party, an ecologist or participate in demonstrations against the government)” + “massive but quiet surveillance to detect dissent early”.
Maybe the posh, velvet glove wrapping a steel fist, way of exercising power in the UK is a fucking paradise next to the “gun in your face” way of the US, but it’s not at all a free and fair system compared with most of Europe, especially Northern Europe.
The system will fuck you for being a dissenter, but they’ll do it by taking your shit, your options and possibly your freedom, not by taking your life. Then again, nowhere in Europe they’ll take your life like that - that specific form of abusive/reckless use of force in policing is very rare in Europe and an outright scandal just about everywhere in it when it happens.
What you’re describing is the way that law should be applied, not how it can be applied: it’s down to the discretion of the police officers who stopped you and the Crown Prosecution Service, whether they detain you and prosecute you or not if, for example, you have a small pocket knife when you get stopped and frisked (which in the UK, like in the US, is statistically more likely if you’re black and look poor or if you look middle eastern).
Just like this specific Anti-Terrorism Law which is now being used in a way other than how the politicians claimed it was going to be used, so the anti-knife legislation is written so that it can be abused - all of it relies on humans in positions of power being fair rather than on the laws being written as fair and I can tell you from personal experience (and even more the experience of friends of mine) that the Justice System’s “fairness” (especially at the lower levels) is a lot different if you’re a White British than if you’re a foreigner, Black, Indian or Middle-eastern looking.
Your argument boils down to “Trust the coppers and trust the Courts” which the very post we’re commenting under shows as total bollocks.
PS: That said I totally agree Britain is not at all a Police State, at least not yet. It already is a Surveillance State at about the level of Eastern Germany, and judging by things going on right now as described in the post we’re commenting under it’s going towards becoming a Police State far faster than most of Europe, but even now the abusing of the overbroad legislation put in place in the last decade or two and of policing powers is still localized - though getting broader and broader - rather than generalized.
Exactly.
The laws making carrying a knive a crime have been on the books for at least a decade and as for firearms the UK has long been like most of Europe in that it’s pretty hard to get a license for anything but a single hunting weapon.
I was an immigrant there and left the UK just before Brexit came into effect and never went back (even though I have friends over there) because I was very aware already back then of the Authoritarian shit already in place (for example, already a decade ago there was no right to have a lawyer present when detained and interrogated at an airport, and the crazy overboard anti-Terrorism legislation now being used was already on the books back then).
The tools now being used very overtly by Starmer have been in place for quite a while, alongside a lot of shit that in the old days one would only find in Authoritarian nations, used for surveillance of the civil society and suppression of free-speech and demonstrations.
That crap that has been added in the last couple of years is but a fraction of the insanely anti-democratic shit already in the books back then, since most of that shit was added in two big waves, one after 9/11 and another after the Snowden Revelations (when the government retroactivelly made legal all the unlawful civil society surveillance that had been doing) and in between and since slowly expanded in scope and layered with ever more oppressive shit, mainly targetting demonstrations and civil society groups.
That said, the Authoritarian mindset of the British elites long predates this latest wave: for example back in the 80s Ecological organisations were under surveillance and even being infiltrated by undercover police officers, and don’t get me started about Britain’ long running Press-Censorship system: D-Notices.
Except in the domain of armed police violence, Britain wasn’t better than the US, it was just much more subtle, which makes sense since at least England is very obcessed with managing impressions, especially the upper classes.
The whole think looked from the start like a scam for Israel to get the remaining hostages held by Hamas whilst only releasing a fraction of the hostages they themselves hold (there are tens of thousands of Palestinians in held by Israel on flimsy charges and thousands more held without being charged).
Also the idea that Netanyahu was going to stop playing his “stay out of jail” card was always far-fetched, plus Trump being involved was also a bit “this is all bullshit” flag.
So naturally we’re back on Israel’s timetable for executing their very own Holocaust on Palestinians (remember, polls show that outright murdering all Gazas is supported by almost half of all Israelis, whilst almost 80% support either that or expelling them all to other countries).
Because that’s how it worked for pretty much everything back in the day when your chances of getting a loan from the bank depended on the impression of trustworthiness you projected on the bank manager when you asked for it, rather than some obscure algorithm running in the bank’s systems that didn’t take in account any feedback from an actual human.
Amongst large companies automation removed humans from the loop, at least at an early stage, so now your machine processable input and/or information about you extracted from some other sources about what you’ve done so far, matching whatever the algorithm is configured to favor is all that matters. Sure, beyond that you’ll almost certainly end up with a person making a final decision (for hiring, not for bank loans), but you first have to pass that big initial automated hurdle that’s supposed to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Amongst other things this has killed “being judged as having potential” as a way to get a foot on the door, unless you have a high score on a metric supposedly correlated to it such as good grades at a supposedly elite university, since unlike “impression” such metrics can be mathematically evaluated and compared by algorithms.
Mind you, when looking for work in smaller companies that haven’t outsourced their hiring, impressions still work since your first point of contact is going to be a person whose opinion counts rather than an algorithm or a person too low on the pecking scale for their judgement to be taken in account.
The only thing I’m shocked about in this is the BBC using “said” for both sides in this article when usually in the BBC Hamas “claimed” whilst the IDF “said” or “stated”.
Clearly somebody forgot to make sure that Hugo’s work “follows the Party line” before publishing this piece of his.
Whatabout … China!?
Won’t somebody think about … China???
They’re more likely to do product placement on the movie for a Pharmaceutical company than to actually have such a plot.
In Portugal - which has a National Health Service - I’m getting 5 pens for €0 with a doctor’s prescription (and there are mechanisms for just getting new prescriptions regularly or on request without needing to go for a doctor’s appointment every time), as would anybody else that needs it, by the way, as it’s not means tested.
That said, without said prescription it would be about €70 for 5 pens.
Also the local politicians are slowly but surely destroying the National Health Service in order to privatise Healthcare bit by bit.
They’re the Resistance Française of Gaza, except the (new) NAZIs occupying their land have been there for 7 decades instead of a mere half a decade (plus this time around Britain and the US are part of the Axis alongside the NAZIs), hence their actions are more desperate.
Remembers those WWII films were the Resistance Française, when they caught them dished deadly justice to filthy French Colaborationists that had helped the evil NAZIs either by snitching others to them or even by acting as an auxiliary militia for the occupying NAZI forces? Remember cheering for the Resistance and feeling righteous justice from them dealing with the people who were so evil that they betrayed their own neighbours and even families to the NAZIs?
Morally this is exactly the same situation.
I used to think like that until on the e-mail address I had for my lemmy.world account (an account which I left following that) I started getting e-mails in my native language from an organisation based in Tel-Aviv inviting me to attent a “learn about Israel” online course.
This was when I was already very vocal about the actions of Israel in Gaza.
That e-mail wasn’t public and as far as I know only server Admins have access to that stuff.
When the largest Lemmy instance is infiltrated at the Admin level by state actors (and that’s also very clearly the case for Moderation in the main forums there, as reflected by their moderation actions with even one Moderator of the news forum being very openly Zionist in his posts elsewhere), the idea that there are bots and sockpuppets around in Lemmy trying to shift opinions for the benefit of nations and even large political forces, isn’t exactly outrageous.
I mean, if I remember it correctly the budget of Israel’s Hasbara ops is somewhere around $1 billion a year, so plenty of money to have a few people at least part time trying to influence a place with maybe a few hundred thousand people, like Lemmy.
I considered making a really insulting comment on this just for fun, but I just can’t be arsed.
bunch of religious extremists to murder people in the streets
The IDF was involved???
Both things make sense together - people care more about not making a mess were they live than were they don’t and left-wingers also think about others rather than just themselves - “do to others what you would like them to do to you” - which in this case means don’t leave your trash behind to dirty up the place were others live, whilst rightwingers are all about what’s best for themselves and in a place were they don’t live simply dropping their trash on the ground and leaving it to dirty up somebody else’s streets is less hassle for them personally than carrying their trash to the nearest trash bin.