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Re:Irishman arrested in UK for 'causing anxiety' by retweeti... by pydry on Thursday August 11, 2022 @12:54PM (#32428596)
Arresting someone on flimsy grounds is pretty well protected by decades of case law. The police are granted a wide degree of latitude over whom they can arrest and for what reason. Sometimes this is abused but there are limits to how much damage you can do with this abuse.

The fact a fairly minor inconvenience was suffered to somebody with a pretty sick ideology certainly means I wont be clutching my pearls. Im sure the government did 1000 worse things happened today that didnt catch the attention of the editor of the mirror.

Re:Irishman arrested in UK for 'causing anxiety' by retweeti... by kelnos on Thursday August 11, 2022 @01:34PM (#32429166)
> The fact a fairly minor inconvenience was suffered to somebody with a pretty sick ideology certainly means I wont be clutching my pearls.

This feels like Martin Niemöller's poem, personified. I agree that this guy has a pretty sick ideology, but what if one of us posted something snarky/disrespectful about, say, pedophile religious leaders, and someone got offended, claiming we were being disrespectful toward their religion? I doubt you'd be so calmly dismissive of an arrest in this case, even if it was a "fairly minor inconvenience".

I know UK law is different, but at least in the US, just the fact that you have been arrested, even if no charges are ever filed, can cause you problems down the road. Just last week I was applying to renew my Global Entry subscription (for non-Americans who may not be familiar, it's a lame-I-have-to-do-this-yet-useful program to streamline re-entry into the US after traveling abroad), and there was a question that specifically asked if I had ever been arrested, even if the record for such an arrest had been expunged or sealed. Fortunately I was able to truthfully answer "no" to that, but had I been caught up in something ridiculous like the article describes, I would have had to answer "yes", and possibly be denied a useful government service.

You might also consider that a "minor inconvenience", but I'm sure there are more severe examples where merely having a no-charges-filed arrest on your record can have some dystopian consequences for a person.

> Im sure the government did 1000 worse things happened today that didnt catch the attention of the editor of the mirror.

That's just whataboutism. So we shouldn't care about what are perhaps minor abuses, just because there are worse abuses?

Re:Irishman arrested in UK for 'causing anxiety' by retweeti... by pydry on Friday August 12, 2022 @07:00AM (#32436735)
Whataboutism is definitely the most abused term of 2022.